Thrown Together: Incorporating Place and Sustainability into Early Literacy Education

Catarina Schmidt

doi:10.1007/s13158-017-0192-6

Catarina Schmidt

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-017-0192-6

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Abstract

The development of language and literacy abilities of young multilingual children is important to their future educational engagement and success in school. In this study, the value of taking account of place and sustainability in early literacy education is considered. This research provides ideas for practice-based research on early literacy in multilingual and community-based contexts. In a case study with a Grade 1 classroom in Sweden, the researcher and the teacher implemented various literacy activities to bring children’s own powerful knowledge about place into the classroom. This enabled young children to actively engage with language and literacy in authentic and meaningful ways. Early childhood teachers need to be aware of the importance of incorporating ideas about place and sustainability into early literacy education in order to avoid deficit discourses and instead build participatory practices and support democratic values. Bringing literacy and place together in education can address what is perhaps one of the most crucial questions of sustainability, namely how people within a community can live together while having different values, beliefs and dreams.

Highlights

Learning about being a citizen and contributing to the community can begin in early childhood classrooms
Education for sustainable development can cover a wide range of seemingly complex questions that can be incorporated into the practices of early childhood education (Hagglund and Samuelsson 2009; UNESCO 2005)
The findings reported illustrate that in order to include sustainability within early literacy education, as in this first-grade classroom in Fairfield, the space of learning needs to be widened

Summary

Introduction

Learning about being a citizen and contributing to the community can begin in early childhood classrooms. Education for sustainable development can cover a wide range of seemingly complex questions that can be incorporated into the practices of early childhood education (Hagglund and Samuelsson 2009; UNESCO 2005). Childhood teachers can introduce ideas concerned with social, economic and environmental sustainability into their practices that take account of children’s own communities. Through such practices, children learn, from an early age, about citizenship and about their place in their world through understandings about their world in which they live. Through the teaching and learning of all subjects, students should, according to Lgr 11, be able to ‘‘form a personal position with respect to overarching and global environmental issues’’ (p. 12)

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