ABSTRACT

Many universities internationally have agreed to create an “institutional culture of sustainability” and educate “for environmentally responsible citizenship” (Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, 1990), with willingness to leverage their profiles through engagement with the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations General Assembly, 2015) and as signatories to initiatives such as the Talloires Declaration of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future. In Australia, some universities are members of the Green Gown Award Scheme dedicated to recognizing excellence in sustainability within the tertiary sector. At the school level, Education for Sustainability (EfS) is formally embedded in the national curriculum, while the national Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) includes environmental and sustainability topics (DEEWR, 2009). Despite a watering down of sustainability in the recently revised National Quality Standard (NQS) (ACECQA, 2018), environmental responsibility is still considered an aspect of a quality program for children in early childhood and care settings. With such high-level policy levers supporting EfS at university and practitioner level, what is the contribution of initial teacher education (ITE) – and specifically initial early childhood teacher education (IECTE) – to developing educators who are advocates for environmental and sustainability education? The authors investigated this question through two interrelated research projects. The first involved an audit of EfS within IECTE in Australian universities regarding the extent to which “sustainability” appeared in publicly-available program materials. The second involved a systematic literature review, both national and international, to investigate what has already been researched and reported about EfS within IECTE. Our chapter uses evidence from these two studies to advocate for stronger commitment to EfS in IECTE and to ally this with a robust research agenda from which the entire early childhood education field could benefit. Further studies about early childhood teacher education research are shared in Chapters 10 and 15 of this volume.