Sense of Place Used as Strategy for Early Childhood Teaching
In Western culture, childhood is often understood as a time of innocence, when children should be sheltered from harsh realities of the world. Topics such as climate change—which emphasize the urgency for behavior change and engagement—can be difficult for early childhood education (ECE) teachers to introduce, because they can bring “reality” into the protected space of childhood. In the first section of this paper, the author explored dominant perspectives about what ECE is and how those perspectives can be detrimental to teaching sustainability.