Proceedings of the World Conference on Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Chronicling the Transdisciplinary Agenda in Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Development
Nonzukiso Tyilo
ABSTRACT:
The first 1000 days of a child’s life are important for optimal development, and early childhood learning needs to lay solid foundations for children’s holistic development. During the early years, early childhood education should respond to Sustainable Development Goal 4, which calls for quality, inclusive, equitable, and meaningful early learning that prepares young children for primary education beyond their childhood years. This calls for collaboration from various stakeholders to ensure that a transdisciplinary agenda promoting cohesive learning is accomplished. Adopting transdisciplinary strategies allows young children to explore themes responding to sustainable development while being inducted into becoming global citizens. Although early childhood education advocates for holistic development, children are still challenged in some areas. Hence, this paper examines how transdisciplinary strategies can be incorporated into early childhood education for sustainable development. This paper will adopt a transformative learning theory to encourage people to change their frame of reference and devise new ways of doing things and defining their realities. This theory might benefit early childhood educators to know their role in promoting sustainable early childhood education. The paper adopted a qualitative research and interpretive paradigm, where five ECD centres were selected conveniently from the Amathole West Education District of South Africa. From the centres, 10 participants were purposively chosen for this paper. Semi-structured interviews, analysis of documents, and observations were used to collect data to ascertain how the transdisciplinary agenda is integrated into early childhood education to enhance quality and inclusion to promote global citizenship. The findings reveal that ECD practitioners experience challenges implementing early learning programmes encouraging transdisciplinary approaches. In addition, the training and support from other stakeholders and partner departments do not adequately empower them to navigate the transdisciplinary agenda in an ECD space. The availability of resources is another challenge that ECD centres are confronted with, as a result, ECD practitioners perceive this as negatively impacting the transdisciplinary agenda. Based on the findings, the paper recommends ECD stakeholders not work in silos, but rather form transdisciplinary working groups to address such challenges. The working groups need to create sustainable programmes that advocate for early childhood education that is inclusive, and equitable and promote lifelong learning for children to become global citizens. Intentional professional development endeavors for ECD practitioners are needed to enable practitioners to create appropriate age resources to drive the transdisciplinary agenda and promote sustainable early childhood.
keywords: global citizenship, holistic development, professional development, social change, stakeholder collaboration