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Moving Beyond the Environment Towards a Multi-Pillared Approach: Early Childhood Teachers Understanding and Practices of Education for Sustainability in Aotearoa NZ

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Early childhood education in practice - this is a child looking at butterfly on buddleia with NZ native ferns in the background.

Full reference: Maxwell, A., Hohaia-Rollinson, F, and Woolston, D. (2025).  Moving beyond the environment towards a multi-pillared approach: Early childhood teachers understanding and practices of education for sustainability in Aotearoa New Zealand.  NZ International Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, 27, pp. 69-82.

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ABSTRACT: The future health, wellbeing and sustainability of our planet and those living upon it is in urgent need of transformational change. Early childhood education (ECE) settings in Aotearoa New Zealand are an important part of the national education infrastructure that can be transformational in bringing about this change. The early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE], 2017), provides an important bicultural and sociocultural framework that can support ECE settings increase the national consciousness when education for sustainability (EfS) knowledge, understanding and pedagogies are embedded in everyday practice and apply a place-based education approach. This article shares findings from a research project that investigated ECE teachers’ current understandings and practices of EfS in Aotearoa New Zealand and the influence of local community and context on EfS practices.  The results discussed in this article contributes to the EfS discourse and critical global conversations in relation to EfS to facilitate with more urgency transformational change.  

Key words: Education for sustainability (EfS), localised curriculum, environmental education (EE), kaitiakitanga/guardianship, pillars of sustainability, place-based education.

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