Implementing ESD through PBLs in kindergarten：pedagogy and practice

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Building a sustainable future for our children: comparative studies in early childhood education from China and Norway

Proposal

Education for sustainable development (ESD), which is the inclusion of social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability in teaching content, is becoming more and more important nowadays. In many UN documents, the importance of ESD is highly emphasized. It’s well recognized that ESD is a life-long process from children to adults, and the early childhood is regarded as the most suitable beginning of ESD.. The Role of Early Childhood Education for A Sustainable Society”, pointed out that early childhood education clearly has an important place in the efforts to bring about sustainable development, as the values, attitudes, behaviors and skills acquired in this period may have a long-lasting impact in later life. Early childhood education is recognized as the starting point for life-long learning within education for sustainability. The Gothenburg Recommendations on Education for Sustainable Development(UNESCO,2008b) noted that children are competent，active agents in their own lives and they are affected by, and capable of, engaging with complex environmental and social issues. And Many studies have shown that even young children have the ability to think twice about political, social, cultural and environmental issues and propose solutions (Davis 2008; Mackey 2014; Ji 2015). In order to meet the needs of sustainable development, early childhood education should play a more active role in the path of ESD (Yan Liu & Fengfeng Liu,2007).
However, ESD is a complex concept，it has different meaning or different focus in different countries and regions. We need think globally and act locally.
Since the 1980s, the economy has been growing rapidly in China, and has greatly improved the quality of Chinese people’s life. On the one hand, it has brought nearly 200 million people out of poverty, which creating some serious environmental and socio-economic problems on the other, such as shortages of natural resources, the unbalanced development between the urban and the rural areas, the wide gap between the rich and the poor, and so on. Therefore, to implement ESD in China is imminent. However，although ESD is indeed carried out in some primary and secondary schools in China, few kindergartens have incorporated sustainable development into their curriculum, or they do not understand the concept at all.
So how can we implement ESD in the kindergarten within their own curriculum? What’s the appropriate way to do that？Can children really make a change for sustainable development？This action research is trying to find the answers to the questions mentioned above.
This action research is currently underway for one year in the kindergarten located in Shenzhen，China. The government is committed to building Shenzhen into a model city for eco-civilization construction, a China’s Silicon Valley and a global city. While this kindergarten is located in Shenzhen’s largest residential community for civil servants, and is surrounded by Meilin Reservoir and Meilin Park，which means it has unique natural and social resources to implement ESD. Besides, starting in 2012, this kindergarten has been devoted to explore their own curriculum in the context of health promotion, and they started to incorporate ESD into their curriculum in 2017.
We do know that in some western countries，the Project Approach has been utilized to explore sustainable development in kindergarten，such as Korea and Australia. We hope to explore more possibilities based on Project Approach. So PBLs is utilized in our kindergarten. The PBLs means multiple concepts，which can be interpreted as problem-based learning，project-based learning or phenomena-based learning. Through PBLs, we have accumulated some cases which showed how young children can achieve social, economic and environmental sustainability. We also summarized some strategies for kindergarten teachers when implementing PBL，such as asking challenging problem or question， reflection，critique and revision，making public product and so on. We are trying to establish curriculum standards，which aligns with the key principle of ESD. We are also trying to assess young children’s progress and achievement through pedagogical documentation and the curriculum standards. But we are still on the way. We do hope that these PBLs cases we have accumulated will bring more inspiration to practitioners in China and even all over the world.

Authors

• Xuehua Qiu, ShenZhen No.3 kindergarten

• Minyi Li, Beijing Normal University

• jingyi xu, ShenZhen No.3 kindergarten