Developing a Pedagogy of Education for Sustainable Futures: Experiences and Observations from Danish Preschools

Attention, interest, curiosity, and wonder

An education for emergent science and sustainability in preschool cannot be transmitted by the teachers via traditional teaching (Dewey, 1997), on the contrary, it must be based on children’s interest and own life. However, the teacher plays an important role in order to inspire the children and also to create a challenging environment. First of all, the teacher has to catch children’s attention. This can lead to establishment of an interest. Based on this, a curiosity can appear and maybe a real wonder will arise. These four concepts—attention, interest, curiosity, and wonder—can form the basis for education for science and sustainability.

Attention is a starting point for an emergent science and sustainability education. At the playground, a 2-year-old boy concentrates at some water drops falling from a hole in the gutter. Gradually the water drops make a depression or a whole. Such a focused attention is defined by concentration, maintenance, and the ability to exclude disturbance (Vygotsky, 1929/1979).

Because the child in his interaction with the observed object is not able to understand or obtain this water drop phenomenon, an interest arises. Interest is expressed when the child gains a desire to examine an object or a phenomenon. Children’s interest has been associated with activities, and children’s choice to be involved in the activity (Hedges & Cooper, 2016). Dewey said that “interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the subject and the object; it is the instrument which affects their organic union” (Dewey, 1913/2009, p. 17). Thus, interest acts as a bridge between the object and the child. Related to the example with the 2-year-old boy one might say, that his focused attention at this science phenomenon leads to the development of a growing interest. Whatever, some researchers do not draw a distinction between curiosity and interest, as they are based on the same cognitive process (Silvia, 2006), and interest seems to arise before curiosity and actually pave the way for the development of children’s curiosity. Hedges (2018) argues that personal interest can provide a source of curiosity and motivation.

The shift from interest to curiosity happens when the subject meets new, surprising, unclear, or conflicting impacts and consequently strives to get knowledge and understand the object. As Loewenstein (1994) states, curiosity is an appetite for knowledge.

Curiosity is seen as a form of cognitively induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge or understanding (Loewenstein, 1994). With reference to Menning (2018), curiosity has at least four forms. (1) Curiosity as an intrinsic value, which is valuable in itself. (2) Curiosity expressed as something relational; the children are curious about what happens in the group. (3) Curiosity as a character strength relates to critical thinking. (4) Finally, curiosity as a starting point and as a tool for the acquisition of knowledge often related to science and math. In general, curiosity looks for solutions within a given structure and very often involves an active interaction with the surrounding world with a wish to understand and maybe change the world.

Where curiosity focuses on a specific object or some kind of phenomenon in order to get more knowledge, the philosophical term wondering describes an emotion composed of astonishment, joy, and curiosity (Shand, 1920). For a while, our existing knowledge is set by the hinges (Miller, 1992). Wondering is connected to the act of contemplation and aims to look behind the existing structure (Opdal, 2001) and beneath the surface (Piersol, 2014, p. 8). When children express a wondering, they state a feeling aroused about something strange or surprising, as a cause of astonishment. Wondering appears when we meet something we do not expect, and then we are forced to reflect why this situation or phenomenon looks like this.

The development of children’s attention, interest, curiosity, and wonder can be seen as a part of their psychological structure, which opens their eyes and helps them to relate themselves to the surrounding world, to ask questions, and to start critical actions, including actions related to sustainability.

Play

To construct a play-based approach, at least two dimensions are reflected, namely a definition of the concept of play and how play can be organized in practice. In this study, play in general refers to Vygotsky (1978) and the model of organizing play is in accordance with the Scandinavian approach known as playworlds (Baumer et al., 2005; Broström, 1999; Hakkarainen et al., 2013; Lindqvist, 1995). To organize a playworld could mean to construct an imaginary play situation (Elkonin, 1980), where children could initiate a play theme, make up a drama play with different roles and play actions that they could change reality and the meaning of objects and actions.

From a cultural-historical understanding of play, it is assumed that important changes take place in the preschool child’s psyche through play, which pave the way for the child’s transition to a new level of development (Leontjev, 1981, p. 369). A number of dimensions (Lillemyr, 2009) seem to characterize (role) play, which is visible in the following science play episode:

During children’s play at the sunny playground, two boys discovered a hole in the wall of the house from which air was pouring out. They wondered and asked themselves: How can this happen? After a research, they realized the air originates from the dryer. Then they started a play with air. They filled air in big thin plastic bags and used them as balls and balloons. They also used them as spaceships and imagined themselves as astronauts. The boys had fun for a while. Then they were challenged by science questions. A filled black bag, which had laid in the sun for a period was lifted up from the ground. The boys found this floating phenomenon very mysterious.

Based on curiosity and wonder, the boys started to discover and play. The play was internally motivated, meaningful, and characterized by phantasy, interaction, and communication, which are typical dimensions of play.

Play is voluntary, spontaneous, and independent (Froebel, 1887). If you try to force play, children will stop playing. The children control what happens, take initiatives, and choose roles; the children can decide what to play and how to play.

Play is intrinsically motivated and involves feelings of enjoyment. The motive of play lies in the process itself, in the contents of the action, not in the result. Children play just in order to play. According to Leontjev (1978), the motive to play is to play, the activity is play, and because the child’s motive is concordant with the object or goal of the action (Leontjev, 1981), the child experiences the play activity as meaningful.

As children imitate and identify people and activities around themselves, play may be regarded as a subjective reflection of reality (Leontjev, 1981), but often the child reproduces observations and experiences in his or her own way. Like this, often play is a creative activity through which the child changes his or her surroundings, leaves out something, and invents something. Thus, play is characterized by fiction, imagination, and phantasy (Singer & Singer, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978).

Play is characterized by interactions and communication. Play is a social activity in which human relations are essential and expressed together with peers (Launer, 1968). In a shared activity and through communication, they create actions and meanings. Especially, Bateson (1972) and Schwartzman (1978) stress the communicative aspect in play. In the play, the children create relations and interactions between each other, among persons, events, and ideas. The children’s message contains various ways of interpretation. The message contains a specific content (text), and it also produces a signal about how to interpret the content (context). To understand the message, the recipient has to take in both text and context. A communication like this takes place on several levels. The children give some play signals to tell each other “this is play” (Bateson, 1972).

When teachers and children organize activities focusing on science and sustainability, their investigations and endeavors have a play character in accordance with the above dimensions and can be implemented and organized in a playworld.

Playworlds

As mentioned, it is possible to organize science and sustainability activities in an imaginary play situation, a playworld. According to Lindqvist (1995), the playworld describes long play sessions where children and teachers based in a shared theme make up a dramatization, an aesthetic play, often with reference to children’s literature, for example, the Moomins, Pippi Longstocking, and Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Broström (1999) constructs an organized play where teachers and children based in shared experiences build a collective fantasy—a frame play. In both approaches, teachers and children play together. Teachers show respect for children’s ideas and play initiatives but they inspire and support children’s play, and they also take play initiatives themselves. Thus, the term guided play can be used (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009).

The imaginary play situation, the context, the frame, or with another name the playworld must be visible for all children. According to Bateson (1972), the establishment of the context functions as a psychological frame to guide the participants to include certain messages and actions and to exclude others. The playworld can be strengthened via physical design and equipment, which supports children’s shared imagination, and through this, the topic or theme is constructed.

According to Hakkarainen (2010), all playworlds integrate some kind of psychological tools to support the transitions from reality (e.g., children’s classroom) to imaginary playworld. In a frame play, children changed the room to an emergency call center and hospital where they play for days (Broström, 1999). In a play project in an American kindergarten class in school, researchers, teachers, and children created a playworld based on C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Baumer et al., 2005). Every Friday all participants walked through a wardrobe (the backing of the wardrobe was removed) and entered a fictive world (the neighbor classroom).

Up to now, as far as we know, there are no examples of studies on playworlds including emergent science and sustainability. However, Fleer (2017) describes in detail how to build a scientific playworld, a collective scientific imaginary situation. Based on a story with narrative structure and with use of different psychological tools, they build a scientific playworld focusing on nature phenomena: A plastic bubble pretended to be a drop of water in which children play inside, or they construct a fabric tunnel in which children imagine they were worms, caterpillars, or butterflies.

In this article, we take a first step toward an educational approach focusing on playworlds related to emergent science and sustainability.

Sustainable future via play-based science activities: Playworlds

In order to get more knowledge on how teachers and children are able to handle a pedagogy for science and sustainability in everyday life, Frøkjær and Husted (2019) made up in a 2-year-long open-ended experiment with teachers and children from five preschools in Denmark. The study was conducted as an action research project, which implied local experiments that extended or developed existing nature activities to meet regulated nature and to reach out for sustainability issues (Frøkjær & Husted, 2019).

The purpose of the project was to investigate how educational activities on nature and natural phenomenon with focus on relation among human beings, nature, and sustainability can be expressed in preschools.

These inspiring local experiments combine nature activities with questions about sustainability. The experiments proved to favor eco-friendly innovations (e.g., waste disposal, reuse, and resource awareness), aimed to enhance children’s eco-friendly behavior. The study also produced eco-critical suggestions on how to open the world and encourage children’s critical thinking about resources and our common future, for example, the development of a critical view on the societal regulation of interaction between human beings and nature.

The action study also showed a need for development of a narrow link between children’s focus on sustainability and the development of children’s science knowledge. Therefore, as a next step, Frøkjær and Husted (2019) constructed an outline of educational principles based on the involved teachers’ understanding of preschool emergent science (Siraj-Blatchford, 2001) and the development of a scientific playworld where science and sustainability is a part of play-based settings (Baumer et al., 2005; Fleer, 2017; Sikder & Fleer, 2016).

An example: A playworld about beach treasures and garbage

One of the five preschools, that participated in Frøkjær and Husted’s (2019) action research project “a pedagogy for sustainability in everyday life,” focused on waste and recycling. They particularly pay attention to a nearby beach. The children visited the beach at different times, and they experienced, and found different garbage on the beach, when they went on their trips to collect beautiful stones and seashells. Back in preschool, they started to ask the question: What is waste and what is not waste? They borrowed books from the library on the subject and visited the nearby Blue Planet, which is Northern Europe’s largest marine aquarium. The Blue Planet is situated in the middle of water, which should give visitors a feeling of being below sea level. They visited the aquarium exhibition on pollution of the seas, and the children were both surprised and shocked at how much waste there is in the seas. Especially examples from the Pacific with waste islands the size of France, “Which is much larger than Denmark!” a boy said. In addition, a photo exhibition, with pictures of especially the seabirds sitting in the waste, made a big impression on the children. Some of the children were angry that “the fishermen and the big ships were throwing all the waste in the sea!”

The research on “what is waste and what is not waste” was mainly about the questions: What is natural material? And also: “What is trash on the beach?” After the visit to the Blue Planet, a new question arose: “How does the waste affect the animals?” Based on this question, the teachers got the idea to investigate the theme further by giving all the children a “treasure chest.” During the excursion to the beach, the children collected items and material for their own treasure chest. They talked very intensely with each other and the adults about “is it now waste or is it natural?” But they ended up with “garbage can be treasure too!” Thus, both “cultural things” and “natural things” ended up in the individual treasure chests, and in addition, the children brought the large common treasure chest. The collection of waste was based on the question, which led children’s activities: “What belongs to the beach and what does not belong to the beach.” Later, children visited the Recycling Center, and here an employee told them what can be recycled and what cannot be recycled. In this way, the children were inspired to discuss “what is a healthy beach” and “what is a healthy sea.” During the discussion, the children realized the fact that we all have to take care of our waste. Children expressed their deep concerns about how to dispose of their waste in a proper way and claimed that no more waste discharge into the sea, otherwise “both fish and seabirds die from it.”

During the visit to the waste and beach treasure, the children also experimented with plastic, such as a plastic bag in a jam glass, in order to investigate whether the animals can see plastic in the sea. During the experiments, a number of science questions appear, for example, how long time will it take for plastic to perish? Or with the children’s word “to disappear.” Therefore, plastic was dug down into the ground at the playground, in order to investigate, what happens after some time. And the teachers planned the course where the children from the preschool told the children from the nursery about their beach treasures and showed them their treasure chests. The children were especially busy telling the little kids about how important it is, that we do not throw waste in the wild, and that we look after the animals in the wild, even in the sea, so that they do not die from it. The daily encounters with the parents were also marked by the many children’s experiences and wonders along the way. As a feedback to the teachers, many parents told them that the children’s stories at home were sometimes marked by great excitement and resentment.

This description of a playworld in a Danish preschool is first and foremost characterized by the choice of a cultural device, namely the children’s own treasure chests and their common treasure chest (Fleer, 2017). It is also the description of, how the preschool teachers take the children to scientific journeys: To the beach to investigate, what the sea has washed up, and thus observe the difference between what is real nature and what is waste affected by people. In addition, during the visit to the Blue Planet, children saw images of pollution in the oceans. And also, during the visit to the Recycling Center, children learned about what can be recycled, and they were ready to initiate research and experiments at home and in the preschools. We, therefore, see examples of exploration and building of a scientific narrative, as well as imaginary situations as thoughts, experiments, and modeling.

In addition, besides children’s appropriated science knowledge, for example, learning about the degradation of plastic, and also insight in sustainability, for example, how plastic in the sea harm the animals, they become emotionally attached. First of all, the children became emotionally charged in relation to the visit to the Blue Planet. It resulted in many conversations happened among the children, the children and the adults, especially about the terrible fact that “the ships throw all that waste into the sea.” “The fish and the birds can die from it!” All the scenarios would be a good example for Fleer’s Land of Learning Playworld (Fleer, 2017).

Crucially, the educators’ dynamic planning of the course is underway. The above description is not just an example of a long-term science and sustainability course, planned in advance by the teachers. On the other hand, it is an example of how preschool teachers meet children’s curiosity and wonder along the way and end up with an educational process, similar to “Five Steps to Create a Scientific Playworld” (Fleer, 2019).