Welcome to follow the research project Promoting Sustainability in Early Childhood Education and Care, or in short PROSUS!

PROSUS is a collaboration that has emerged from our shared interest in sustainability issues within the realm of ECEC. It is also an arena for shared thinking about the role and possibilities of ECEC in times of ecological crisis and planetary emergency. Our research focus is twofold: we are interested in both the current sustainability practices and pedagogies and in how they might be both promoted by collegial learning processes.

A practical aspect of our research is the PROSUS tool, which is a mapping tool that staff in ECEC can use a) in order to document and assess their sustainability work and b) in order to enhance reflection and discussion about sustainability education at the team level as well as c) develop practices that can promote sustainability. The PROSUS tool is an adaptation of the OMEP ESD Rating Scale and it is informed by the Finnish educational legislation and policy concerning sustainability as well as contemporary research in the field of sustainability education. The tool is available in both national languages, Swedish and Finnish. It has been piloted and elaborated in collaboration with practitioners during 2019 and 2020 and will be published on this website shortly.

On this website we will regularly publish posts about our research endeavour in the PROSUS project. We will also invite guest writers that can contribute to our common understanding of how sustainability work in ECEC can be part of the transition towards a genuinely sustainable world. As we ourselves represent the multilingual university contexts in Finland, we will share posts in either English, Finnish and/or Swedish.

Welcome! Tervetuloa! Välkommen!

Satu and Ann-Christin