Environmentalists and sustainability educators suggest that the greatest concern for our youngest generation may be the environment and how to ensure sustainable use of the world’s resources (Elliot & Davis, 2009) into the future. However we know very little about what young children know and understand about the environment, sustainability, and just sharing of resources, nor how they represent these understandings to themselves and others. This paper presents findings from a multi-site, international study which investigates the connections of and between literacy and sustainability across eight early childhood sites in two countries – Australia and Finland. In order to gain greater insight, we couple sustainability and literacy – two vital concerns of early childhood education in current times – to consider how language and children’s worlds are connected. Our aim is to investigate how children name their worlds when asked to consider sustainability, and when place is foregrounded in the contexts in which they play and learn. 

To achieve this aim, the study is organised by the following research question:

How can we integrate literacy and sustainability to produce powerful new learning for young children in education contexts?

We are interested in articulating innovative methods for integrating literacy and sustainability learning in early childhood contexts, and to consider what these might offer researchers and educators of young children as innovative methods of research. For this purpose we base our thinking on Haraway’s (2015) notion of curious practice developed from her interpretation of Despret’s thinking-with. Our approach works to open up, to create possibilities that were not there before, as we research with children and the beings, materials, texts and places with whom/where they learn. Our research practice is to ‘go visiting’ (Haraway, 2009), which has required us to suspend what we think we already know. Researchers, and educators, of young children often work in ways that assume that they already know young children completely. This leads such research to focus, limit and to seek to prove a point about what children can, or more often than not, cannot do. Instead, here, we are inherently interested in the naming practices of the children and how they bring literacy and sustainability together as they play and learn. We remain open to new ways of representing worlds, and we are interested in the children as they are and not just as they will become. We centre children and their concerns and not just children as becoming-adults (Holloway & Valentine, 2000).

Despite traditional skills-based or socio-cultural understandings of literacy retaining currency in political, media and education debates, more recently the field of literacy has been influenced by spatial and new materialist understandings. These ways of thinking foreground the place-based nature of learning literacy and attempt to move our understandings to the more than human world. Literacy can never be displaced from space and time, and is always learned and used in places that are made meaningful through relationships between people, non-human beings, and materials. As children interact in these places, they use language in a variety of forms to represent this engagement with their worlds. Spatial and material studies of literacy (see for example Comber & Nixon, 2009) explicitly acknowledge the spatial elements of learning literacy such as place, scale, space and flow to unpack the historical, spatial, cultural, social and material foundations of learning and using language. Our interest in this research has been twofold: to learn more about the connections between literacy and sustainability for young children; and to consider what these new learnings mean for the design of emerging pedagogies for quality early childhood education.

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