Drawing on a project carried out by an international group of scholars, this presentation aims to discuss the ways in which childhood, nature and nation are entangled in early childhood education curricula in Australia, the Nordic countries (Sweden and Norway) and post-socialist countries experiencing the revival of nationalistic tendencies (Hungary, Poland). While the links between both children/childhood and nature, and children and nation have been long explored in research (Gullestad, 1997; Millei & Imre, 2016), we situated our analysis in the context of the multiple crises, foremost the climate crisis, that the planet now faces. The aim was to reflect on the question whether the conceptualizations of childhood, nature and nation entanglements in the curricula enable the recreation of education for societies experiencing multiple crises (CWRC, 2020), and to develop alternative imaginaries of naturecultures for early childhood education curricula where politics focuses on terra that sustains life on Earth. Several conceptualizations of linkages between children, nation and nature can be reconstructed in the curricula. Most of them uphold human exceptionalism and a notion of nature as homeland tied to patriotism and empty of life. These include: - nature directly linked to the nation, with children learning about their countries' natural environment, developing admiration for its beauty and engaging in activities carried out in nature that deem to constitute the national identity, which can be interpreted as instrumentalizing nature in the ‘pedagogy of nation’ (Millei, 2018); - nature as an object for children to learn about rather than learning with, which works to retain the nature/culture and learning subject/learnt-about-object binaries (CWRC, 2020; Malone, 2016); - nature as something to be protected through actions based on human-invented technologies, including by children posited as nature's carers who safeguard it, a conceptualization that limits the children-nature relationship to stewardship (Taylor, 2017); - children as connected with and belonging to nature, in a wider network of interconnected living organisms and abiotic environment, a conceptualization that potentially opens up the possibility to move beyond the human- and nation-centric approach to nature and start learning to become with the world (CWRC, 2020). We argue that in the context of the planetary environmental crisis, the narrow conceptualizations on nature within the national boundaries and as an outside object of children's learning and care that dominate in the curricula are untenable. For education to respond to the current situation, new ways of thinking about children and nature are required.

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