Curriculum frameworks have an important role in providing guidance to early childhood practitioners on how to integrate knowledge about sustainability into their practice. This article examines how ideas about sustainability are integrated in the early childhood curricula for Australia, England, Norway, Sweden and the USA. The analyses were guided by critical inquiry and a cross-national dialogue and focused on four aspects of the curricula: sustainability presence, views of the child, human-environment relationship and philosophical/theoretical underpinnings on ideas expressed about sustainability. Ideas about sustainability were more implicitly present than explicitly stated in most curricula. It was not evident that children were viewed as world citizens with agency to help foster sustainability. With respect to human-environmental relationship, the framework from Australia expressed greater reciprocity and entanglement, while other frameworks were more anthropocentric despite the variation among curricula. All five frameworks embodied a sociocultural, human development approach with respect to the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. There is a need to consider alternative frameworks that offer broader and more inclusive worldviews about sustainability that includes embracing human, non-human and other species within an assemblage of common worlds.Keywords Anthropocentric Á Curriculum theory Á Early childhood education Á Sustainability Á Education for sustainability Á Child agencyRésumé Les programmes d'études jouent un rôle important dans l'orientation des praticiens de la petite enfance sur la manière d'intégrer les connaissances sur la durabilité dans leur pratique. Cet article examine comment les idées sur la durabilité sont intégrées dans les programmes préscolaires en Australie, Angleterre, Norvège, Suède et aux É tats-Unis. Les analyses ont été guidées par une enquête critique et un dialogue transnational, et axées sur quatre aspects des programmes: la présence de la durabilité, les perspectives de l'enfant, les relations entre l'humain et l'environnement et les fondements philosophiques/théoriques soutenant les idées exprimées sur la durabilité. Les idées sur la durabilité sont plus implicitement présentes qu'explicitement énoncées dans la plupart des programmes. Il n'est pas évident que les enfants sont considérés comme des citoyens du monde ayant la capacité d'agir pour favoriser la durabilité. En ce qui concerne les relations entre l'humain et l'environnement, le programme de l'Australie exprime plus de réciprocité et d'interrelation tandis que les autres sont plus anthropocentriques. Les cinq programmes incluent tous une approche socioculturelle du développement humain comme fondements philosophiques et théoriques. Il est nécessaire d'envisager des programmes alternatifs qui offrent des visions du monde plus larges et plus inclusives sur la durabilité, et qui comprennent l'inclusion des espèces humaine, non humaines et autres à l'intérieur d'un ensemble de mondes communs.Resumen ...

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Early Childhood Education in general, and Early Childhood Education for Sustainability in particular, have dominantly relied on an ontological framework that privileges children's agency. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by attuning to the everyday ways in which children are moved by the weather within a multitude of weather assemblages. It attempts to illustrate how 'learning' could be achieved when bodies come in relation with, and are able to be affected by, other bodies. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research orientation that highlights weather-generated data, the paper elucidates how the weather acts on and comes into relation with humans and non-human bodies. It contends that noticing and engaging with the vitality of weather offers possibilities for creating affects and that this potentially leads to an attunement towards ecological sensibility. Notions such as 'vital materiality' and 'lively assemblages' are discussed as a possibility to go beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the weather, which could pave the way towards a more relational ontology as a basis for emphasizing human's 'inter and intra-dependence' with non-human nature, and hence, arguably, sustainable living.

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In preschool, numbers and shapes typically appear as separate topics. This study explores how a game, designed as a guided play activity with figurate numbers, functions in a preschool context. The guided play involved parking Lego cars in a rectangular shape, and to find out for which number of Lego cars this is possible. Thirteen preschool children in three separate age groups, aged from four to six years, together with their teacher, participated in the study. Their communications through words and actions were recorded. The results exemplify how this guided play provides a rich context for engaging young children with mathematical activities such as counting, sorting, shaping, asking, justifying, and inferring, as well as emotional engagement with the activity.

This article explores how the notion of care is conceptualised and described in early childhood education policies across countries in the majority (Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia) and minority (New Zealand and Sweden) world. A central focus is the relationship and balance between care and education. The authors examined whether there are trends and tendencies to strengthen or weaken the care/education component at the expense of the other. Grounded in local and national knowledge, the authors employed a cross-national collaborative inquiry approach and interrogated the notion of care while extrapolating its implications for the endeavour to design socially sustainable early childhood education. The results revealed that care has remained ingrained within policies in the minority world, while there is a tendency to view it as separate from education in the majority world. Although quantitative goals for early childhood education and care still dominate the majority world, the importance of care and sustainable development are present in all policy documents across the five nations. The authors concluded that strengthening these promising policy endeavours paves the way towards effective educare approaches, which lay the foundation for social sustainability in early childhood education.