Annie Montague, M.A.

A Case for Complexity: Contextualizing Places of Learning in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability

As our collective world faces wide-spread environmental precarity, educational institutions are now faced with an unprecedented responsibility to encourage students to foster relationships with the environment and inspire responses for change. To achieve this among young learners, Annie Montague’s research in the emergent field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) seeks to understand how diverse educational contexts shape young learner’s relationships to their multifaceted environments. Given the vast underdevelopment of ECEfS research in diverse contexts, Annie Montague spent six months conducting qualitative fieldwork in 2017 at world-renowned Green School in Bali, Indonesia through daily participant observation with preschool-aged children, teacher and administrative interviews, document analysis and written personal reflection. The narrative presentation of research findings challenges the over-simplified relationship between “children’s connection to nature” often represented in literature and demonstrates the paramount need to incorporate critical and contextualized place-based learning to improve theory, research, and practice in ECEfS.