Educating for sustainability includes rethinking daily actions, making more sustainable choices, working collaboratively to solve problems, reflecting on individual and collective actions, and creating close relationships with the Other and the context. From an educational perspective understood by its orientation towards the development of lifelong skills and values, education for sustainability intends to promote the development of critical and systemic thinking, as well as the ability to solve problems based on diverse and interdisciplinary strategies in an interpersonal and collaborative way (Mindt & Rieckmann, 2017; UNESCO, 2017; Wiek et al., 2016). Alongside the above, education for sustainability presupposes acting in a locally relevant and contextualised way, to enable stakeholders to participate actively in issues that are part of their interests and daily lives (Boyd, 2019; Ernst & Burcak, 2019; Green, 2017). Currently, special attention has been given to sustainable development objectives, which understand education as one of the main focuses of action to promote relationships between human beings and the context.

It is in the logic of understanding and stimulating the development of cultural, linguistic, and biological relations with the contexts that the concept of biocultural diversity emerges in the present study. It is observed that there is an increasing distance between the subjects and the surrounding context. The importance of the natural and social context in people's lives and well-being is also acknowledged, as well as the benefits associated with greater involvement with the environment from the early years of a child's life (Eriksen, 2013). As such, biocultural diversity emerges as an important concept in the education for sustainability from an early age, as it fosters a relationship with the environment and enables the understanding of relationships in their three dimensions: linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and biological diversity (Batista & Andrade, 2021; Hanspach et al., 2020; Terralingua, 2014). These three axes are present within the scope of the early years, insofar as the tales, songs, and rhymes have, in many cases, a biocultural past based on traditional environmental knowledge which allows for a more careful, reflected, and sustainable life. The commemorative days, popular festivities, or traditions themselves express, together with the first aspects indicated, part of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the context. Biological diversity appears, in turn, in the songs, the rhymes, the customs, the food, and in the health. In fact, it appears everywhere, since this is where the treatment of biocultural diversity in the educational context comes in. A relationship of synergies where linguistic, biological, and cultural diversities are interdependent and co-evolve (Loh & Harmon, 2005; Maffi (ed.), 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003).

Given the aforementioned, the main aim of the present study is to identify and then analyse and reflect upon possible ways of educating for sustainability through pedagogical-didactic strategies focused on biocultural diversity. This research was developed in a Portuguese kindergarten context and intended to contribute to a possible answer to the research question "How can educational practices focused on biocultural diversity promote more sustainable actions of children in a kindergarten context?”. The objectives were to a) understand which pedagogical-didactic strategies were more and less appropriate to the interests and needs of the children; b) analyse how the children reacted to experiences outside the classroom context to which they were accustomed and; c) reflect on the learning promoted during the implementation of the project on sustainability and biocultural diversity.

This study aims to analyse reality to understand possible ways of educating for sustainability through practices focused on biocultural diversity. Thus, the study may be contemplated according to two fundamental moments through design-based research. In the first phase, through an intervention within an international project, a teacher education program was developed for educators and teachers with the theme "dialogue, diversity, and inclusion" from the perspective of education for sustainability. During the teacher education program, pedagogical-didactic projects were developed between teacher educators and teachers, which were later implemented by the teachers in school contexts. Based on these projects and data collected from the different teachers, two projects were selected, one in a kindergarten context and the other in a primary school context. After selecting and analysing the projects, we contacted the respective teachers and redesigned the projects collaboratively. This redesign aimed to make biocultural diversity more explicit in the projects so that it would be possible to understand which strategies might be, or might not be, more appropriate. The methodology adopted is design-based research because of its focus on designing, implementing, and evaluating a set of educational interventions that allow us not only to improve the teachers' educational practices but also to develop competencies related to ways of educating for sustainability (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Collins et al., 2004). The feedback that children and teachers revealed during and after the implementation of the projects, allowed the development of improvements in the proposals. We acknowledge that the project may present characteristics associated with action research. However, considering our research question and objectives, as well as the intention to further investigate interventions in educational settings that enable education for sustainability through biocultural diversity, it seems that design-based research would be appropriate. The researcher was actively involved in the processes of design, implementation, and re-adaptation of the projects, combining theoretical and practical issues, and improving the subsequent interventions based on the previous ones and the data collected. As techniques and tools for data collection, we chose to develop a logbook based on the meetings with the teachers and the processes of participant observation, together with the resources produced by the children and teachers (during the teacher education program) and the audio recording of parts of the sessions to obtain potentially informative, and detailed data about the implementation and impact of the interventions. Content analysis will be the method used to analyse the data collected.

Based on a pre-analysis, it was possible to understand that systems-thinking, strategic, interpersonal, and self-awareness competencies were the most developed competencies based on the competencies frameworks considered (Mindt & Rieckmann, 2017; UNESCO, 2017; Wiek et al., 2016). Through participant observation, it was possible to verify that the children (aged between 3 and 5 years old) were available to question themselves about the relationships that exist between systems, more specifically in a micro-context (family, school, community). Some of the children, especially those who could already express themselves more clearly in oral form, were also interested in their individual and collective role in the functioning of the world and the importance of biological diversity in their lives, more specifically at a cultural level. For the teachers, the role of biocultural diversity became evident, although biological diversity and cultural diversity were highlighted more frequently. Linguistic diversity issues were not often highlighted by the children or the teachers. However, as the interventions took place, a greater interest in the animal, plant and fungal species from the local context became evident. The children started questioning themselves and demonstrating a more critical, respectful, and curious attitude toward the biological diversity of their environment. It should be noted, however, that the project also revealed many difficulties and obstacles. At first, some of the activities proposed collaboratively were not considered appropriate for a heterogeneous group, given their different levels of development and interests. The fact that strategies were promoted in an outdoor context such as pine forests and natural parks also had its drawbacks. In the group, some children were not used to the moments of free exploration in these contexts, which sometimes made them afraid to explore. Nevertheless, with time these children began to show more interest in these explorations and in playing with natural elements.

Anderson, T., & Shattuck, J. (2012). Design-based research: A decade of progress in education research? Educational Researcher, 41(1), 16–25. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X11428813 Batista, B., & Andrade, A. I. (2021). Educating for Biocultural Diversity and Sustainable Development in First Years of Schooling: An Analysis of Documents From the Portuguese Educational System. Frontiers in Education, 6(September), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.652196 Boyd, D. (2019). Utilising place-based learning through local contexts to develop agents of change in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability. Education 3-13, 47(8), 983–997. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2018.1551413 Collins, A., Joseph, D., & Bielaczyc, K. (2004). Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 15–42. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls1301_2 Eriksen, K. G. (2013). Why education for sustainable development needs early childhood education: The case of Norway. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 15(1), 107–120. https://doi.org/10.2478/jtes-2013-0007 Ernst, J., & Burcak, F. (2019). Young Children’s Contributions to Sustainability: The Influence of Nature Play on Curiosity, Executive Function Skills, Creative Thinking, and Resilience. Sustainability, 11(15), 4212. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11154212 Green, M. (2017). ‘If there’s no sustainability our future will get wrecked’: Exploring children’s perspectives of sustainability. Childhood, 24(2), 151–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216649672 Hanspach, J., Jamila Haider, L., Oteros‐Rozas, E., Stahl Olafsson, A., Gulsrud, N. M., Raymond, C. M., Torralba, M., Martín‐López, B., Bieling, C., García‐Martín, M., Albert, C., Beery, T. H., Fagerholm, N., Díaz‐Reviriego, I., Drews‐Shambroom, A., & Plieninger, T. (2020). Biocultural approaches to sustainability: A systematic review of the scientific literature. People and Nature, 2(3), 643–659. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10120 Loh, J., & Harmon, D. (2005). A global index of biocultural diversity. Ecological Indicators, 5(3), 231–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2005.02.005 Maffi (ed.), L. (2001). On biocultural diversity: linking language, knowledge and the environment (1 st ed.). Smithsonian Institution Press. Mindt, L., & Rieckmann, M. (2017). Developing competencies for sustainability-driven entrepreneurship in higher education: A literature review on teaching and learning methods. Teoría de La Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 29(1), 129–159. https://doi.org/10.14201/teoredu291129159 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Maffi, L., & Harmon, D. (2003). Sharing a world of difference: the earth’s linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. Terralingua. (2014). Biocultural diversity education initiative. UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives. Education for Sustainable Development. The Global Education 2030 Agenda. http://www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-%0Ahttp://www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-use-ccbysa-en Wiek, A., Bernstein, M. J., Foley, R., Cohen, M., Forrest, N., Kuzdas, C., Kay, B., Keeler, L. W., & Introduction. (2016). Operationalizing Competencies in Higher Education for Sustainable Development. Routledge Book of Higher Education for Sustainable Development, October 2015, 241–260.