Participation as ‘Taking Part In’: Education for Sustainability in Swedish Preschools

Abstract

Children today face a rapidly changing society with new social, economic, ecological and political challenges. This study attaches special importance to modern childhood, learning and didactics, and citizenship from a child-oriented perspective. Early childhood education for sustainability (as taught in Swedish preschools) is examined and the ways that young children are seen as active participants and agents of change are described. The theoretical framework of this qualitative study is guided by a critical theory approach. The empirical material is derived from 18 applications submitted by preschools to the Swedish National Agency for Education for a Diploma of Excellence in Education for Sustainability. The findings show that education for sustainability in Swedish preschools can be interpreted as a project defining human individual responsibility in a modern, pluralistic and contradictory world. Education for sustainability is seen as an important task in preschool educational activities, as is children's participation in various activities dealing with sustainability issues. Children are described as important actors in relation to their own lives in the present and in the future. In these various activities, hidden structures appear, along with taken-for-granted assumptions in need of reflective study. Children's participation and agency were mostly understood in terms of ‘taking part in’, and even though the overall rhetoric in the texts expressed a children's rights perspective, children were not really recognised to any great extent as active participants or as agents of change. An affirmative approach to change was detected in which underlying structures of inequity and gender inequality, and notions about human connectedness to nature and unsustainable lifestyles, are not problematised. Nevertheless, some transformative approaches are emerging, with children's participation and rights being interpreted and handled as an important part of the everyday practices in the preschools.