Your top questions answered!

Thanks to everyone who joined our recent webinars and for asking brilliant questions about how you and your centre’s team can take the next steps towards a cup-filling approach to sustainability in early childcare education. 

If you missed the webinar, you can watch the recording here.

Growing a new generation of sustainable thinkers, doers, and innovators starts with the answers to your webinar questions (thanks for writing them so perfectly!)

Q1. How could I implement sustainability within my centre in a way that doesn't put extra workload on educators? 

The good news is that sustainability doesn’t have to mean more work. Education for sustainability can be woven through your everyday practices.

The goal is to engage children in collaborative critical inquiry - to notice, question, and challenge unsustainable thinking and actions in everyday conversations with children. In other words, it’s less about teaching specific content and more about teaching the thinking processes that allow children to engage with the questions all around them. This means finding ways to help children think more deeply. 

It's less about creating new play experiences and more about how you approach existing ones. You can use the Early Years Learning Framework to help you reflect on the opportunities offered by everyday situations in your classrooms, the things you notice children doing and saying, their learning and play interests, and the strengths they have that you already know how to build on. 

A curriculum based on your observations of children interacting with their places is a truly emergent and dynamic one. It captures the best of what the EYLF has to offer, responding to children and place, and building on these intentionally.

To keep it light on educators, it is also essential to lean into your and other educators’ strengths, interests and experiences as you do this.

Sustainability doesn’t sit outside what you already do - it lives within every story, play experience, and conversation!

Q2. How might we implement sustainability opportunities in our centre in a way that is not tokenistic?

We love this question because it helps us explain the need to reframe the old approach of teaching sustainability in a silo. Instead, focus on bringing education for sustainability into everything you do in your centre and into every learning opportunity with children.

Rather than doing special gardening or recycling projects to teach ‘the green stuff’, we need to view sustainability as a holistic endeavour and take a more integrated, place-based, whole-of-centre approach. Implementing education for sustainability in your centre means weaving sustainable thinking into everything you do with children in your centre.

Sustainability can be defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (United Nations Brundtland Commission, 1987). So what can you do in early education today to help children thrive within the limits of our planet tomorrow?

At Endless Play Studio we can help you align your team behind a holistic understanding of sustainability, develop a bespoke Sustainability Action Plan and work on the ground with the leadership team and educators to implement education for sustainability in a way that’s both authentic and cup-filling.

Q3. How could I support our sustainability champion to motivate all of our educators so it’s a team effort, not just one person?

In the same way that you can use children’s interests to teach education for sustainability, you can also use your own personal strengths, interests and experiences to help children imagine and build a regenerative world.

Education for sustainability is broad enough for every educator to find an angle that speaks to their values, interests, preferences, and strengths. If you love crafting, do that. If you love cooking, that works too. Educators will find reward and satisfaction driving education for sustainability when they realise that it’s easier than expected, that they are already doing more than they thought, and that they can do more in a way that fills their cup.

It’s also essential for the leadership team to set the tone and intentionally drive a whole-of-centre approach to education for sustainability. At Endless Play Studio, we help leadership teams drive a culture of sustainability at their centres.

Q4. How can I encourage my fellow educators to get excited about it like I am - to create a better future for everyone?

We’re so glad you’re excited because education for sustainability isn’t more work - it’s the work we need to do! And it can be deeply satisfying and regenerative for us too.

We can’t force other educators to become interested in gardening or composting, but we can help them see that sustainability is more than ‘the green stuff’. We can show them all of the wonderful ways in which they are already driving education for sustainability. And we can show them that it’s easier and more satisfying than they ever imagined.

At Endless Play Studio, we advocate for a regenerative approach to sustainability in ECE which means aiming for a win-win-win for children, educators, centres, the community, and the planet. This concept emanates from how the natural world works and is deeply rooted in Indigenous cultures, where regeneration is embedded in every way of being, thinking, and acting.

When a centre operates with abundant thinking, it transforms its culture. The regenerative classroom becomes a place of energy and optimism, where people walk away feeling inspired and equipped to help others thrive within the limits of our planet.

Q5. How could we find an elder who could come to our preschool and build an ongoing relationship with us and our children? 

You can find advice on how to connect with Elders in Koori Curriculum's blog posts and "Educator Yarns" podcast resources, where Jessica Staines provides detailed guidance.

🌿 Want to learn more about how to implement education for sustainability at your centre? 

➡️ If you're ready to make sustainability a priority in your centre, our 2-hour masterclass would be a great next step for you and your team.

➡️ If you’re trying to get others on board and could use some more information to do that, get our guidebook here.  Or follow us on socials via the links at the top of our website!