Drama as symbolic nature pedagogy: Fostering environmental awareness and climate consciousness in preschoolers

Early childhood is a critical window for cultivating children’s environmental identities, yet urban preschool contexts often constrain direct access to nature. This qualitative case study examined how a drama-based environmental education program influenced preschool children’s environmental awareness and emerging climate consciousness in Türkiye. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives on play and symbolic mediation, the study conceptualized environmental awareness as children’s recognition and causal description of environmental elements and problems, and climate consciousness as value-laden, responsibility-oriented reasoning linking everyday actions to ecological and climate-related consequences. Participants were 41 children aged 61–73 months in a preschool in northern Türkiye. Over twelve weeks (24 sessions), the program used creative drama, role-play, and dialogic storytelling across seven themes: soil, water, air, biodiversity, energy, urbanization, and a livable world. Data were generated through pre- and post-intervention interviews with children, interviews with teachers and parents, and classroom observations, and were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis guided by operational indicators. Children’s initially fragmented and utilitarian understandings of environmental elements developed into more relational interpretations, and their awareness of environmental problems became more specific and causally articulated. Some children expressed responsibility-oriented reasoning indicative of emerging climate consciousness, although explicitly climate-linked reasoning was voiced by a smaller subset and was partly scaffolded by adults. Teacher and parent accounts suggested short-term transfer into classroom routines and home practices. The study distinguishes environmental awareness from climate consciousness as developmentally appropriate constructs and conceptualizes drama as a symbolic nature pedagogy through which children can rehearse environmental responsibility in classroom-bound contexts.