This is the blog for a research project called LIVE PLAY LEARN, which runs in connection with the ECEC teacher education programme at the Åbo Akademi University in 2020-2022. The project aims to explore how children´s opportunities to develop their capacities to live a sustainable life can be strengthened by enhancing the sustainability work within day care and pre-primary units. A special interest is directed towards supporting a relational worldview, based on the understanding of oneself as deeply entangled with the entire web of Life.
We seek to explore practices and pedagogies that can contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle and to resilience among children and adults within ECEC. Nature contact, as well as holistic and arts-based approaches, are studied as paths towards a “pedagogy of hope and action” and our ambition is to promote truly transformative and transgressive learning processes among both children and adults.
The blog is our way of sharing our research endeavour with the world. We will post on both theoretical perspectives and research activities, as well as give you glimpses of the practices and pedagogies that children and adults in the project share with us. As we are connected to both ECEC teacher education and CPD, there will also be posts related to supporting teacher professionalism in sustainability matters both pre- and in-service. The blog will contain posts in English as well as in Swedish and Finnish, depending on the primary audience of each post*. We will also share links to valuable resources and publish research output (see the menu above).
So please follow, please comment, and please join us in our exploration of how children and adults live, play, and learn as they embark on the journey towards sustainability together!
*The Åbo Akademi University operates mainly in Swedish, but is situated in a bilingual and multilingual context where research is communicated both in Finnish and English. As the university´s leading principles include diversity, openness, courage, sustainability, and participation, we want to “live as we learn” and include voices from various contexts in various languages.