Learning Circles

Children and families face challenges every day. Increasingly, these include the physical, emotional and social effects of severe weather – heatwaves, cyclones, floods, bushfires. As educators, we now support children experiencing issues that didn’t have names in our own childhoods: climate anxiety, eco-grief, solastalgia. How can we help children build the knowledge, skills and attitudes to cope with these complexities – now and into their futures?

Dr Andrea Baldwin is an ecopsychologist and children’s author. For the past decade, she has been one of a small number of mental health professionals specializing in early childhood and climate change. Andrea’s learning circle will explore how evidence-based principles for helping children build resilience can be applied practically and creatively in early learning settings, to help children and families cope with their changing world.

Free to members from participating Alliance networks EEEC (VIC), LGS (WA), ECET (TAS), QECSN (QLD), (NSW) EYNC

The learning circle will be an opportunity to explore ways of knowing, being and doing that can inform early childhood educational practices. We will discuss how reconfiguring our own understanding of self can help us to be more inclusive and engage in place based environmental education.

Exploration of ‘the relational self’ will inform culturally respectful learning practices which are relevant to environmental education. A pedagogy of land will allow educators and children alike to critically reflect on their relationship to place and regard for others.

Examples of strategies to help educators support children and families to avoid the dominant or ‘logic’ ways of knowing, being and doing will be shared through inquiry, active discussion of real-world problems, and exploration of the unknown.

There will be opportunities to share stories of your own connections regarding the development of diverse cultural relationships and how they were or can be formed respectfully.

This will lead us beyond theory and into practice to consider the importance of place-based learning techniques, for minimising unconscious bias, and fostering respect for cultural differences.

The Alliance is inviting you to participate in our next Learning Circle on Wednesday 27 August, 7-8pm AEST.
The focus will be on energy conservation and renewable energy in early childhood services. The Learning Circle discussion is inspired by the recently published Parents for Climate educator resource "Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy for Children’s Healthy Futures Downloadable from Resource: Teaching preschool kids about energy – Parents for Climate The Learning Circle will include links to the EYLF v2, practical ideas, play experiences and pedagogies. The session will be led by Dr Sue Elliott with insights from case study practitioners. Join us to share your questions and actions for renewable futures for all.