Leading change toward future sustainability: Teacher environmental leadership and its impacts on the environmental attitudes of early childhood teachers

Abstract

Recently, early childhood education for sustainability has increasingly attracted worldwide attention. Early childhood teachers' leadership and environmental attitudes are significant in supporting children's nature play, which is associated with sustainability to a large extent. This article emphasizes teacher environmental leadership and its impacts on the environmental attitudes of early childhood teachers through a quantitative study. A total of 832 valid responses are collected through an online survey. According to the outcomes, there are five validated perspectives in teacher environmental leadership. Still, the perspective of environmental stewardship should be updated with more content relevant to environmental utilization in the next step. Job satisfaction, closely related to teacher environmental leadership, is a significant moderator on the association between teacher environmental leadership and their environmental attitudes. The moderation model implies that the priority is to highlight their environmental attitudes toward utilization and provide support to achieve high levels of environmental leadership and job satisfaction constantly. Kindergarten principals play a key role in initiating this process, which suggests that cultural factors should be considered.