Abstract
This literature review describes and analyses 19 peer-reviewed scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2020 that focus on the notion of the Anthropocene in early childhood education. The review is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts stemming from environmental history and the sociology of childhood. The results of the analyses are presented under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how these children pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. The review concludes by noting research gaps in the current literature that would benefit from further analysis in future studies in the early childhood education field.
Highlights
This literature review describes and analyses 19 peer-reviewed scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2020 that focus on the notion of the Anthropocene in early childhood education
That the notion of the Anthropocene has entered the field of early childhood education (ECE), it is time to investigate the kinds of research problems and focuses emerging from recent scholarly efforts in relation to the Anthropocene
It is evident that the notion of the Anthropocene has emerged and engaged ECE scholars over the past five years
Summary
The review below is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts. These concepts stem from different fields and are used together to address a research problem positioned at the intersection of ECE and the Anthropocene. The second pair is the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child, developed by sociologist of childhood Chris Jenks (2005) This combination of analytical concepts from two distinct disciplines permits investigation, in this article, of the relationship between the categories ‘the nature of children’ and ‘the nature of education’. I use the distinction between the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child as a conceptual pair to study how ECE researchers make sense of education in relation to children in the Anthropocene. These two concepts provide a theoretical foundation for answering the third research question: ‘What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?’
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