Editorial - Special Issue: Contemporary Research on Early Childhood Education for Sustainability

Abstract

The first IJEC special issue on early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) was published in 2009. It included an article (Davis et al. 2009) about the UN set of recommendations adopted for education for sustainable development (ESD) in early childhood education, which are also titled The Gothenburg Recommendations. The 2009 special issue also included papers with themes on citizenship, globalisation, diversity, cultural relevance, policy and pedagogy, but only a few were informed by empirical research. In the editorial for the 2009 special issue, John Siraj-Blatchford (2009) noted that these papers focused on interrogating dominant economic and political thinking, promoting the three pillars of sustainability, and investigating the challenges of globalisation. Almost a decade later as global climate change has become a cause for mitigation rather than prevention, it appears more than timely for us, as guest editors, to revisit ECEfS. Our intent in this editorial is to critically reassess the journey travelled so far and propose avenues for further exploration.