Nature-based early childhood activities as environmental education?: A review of Japanese and Australian perspectives

In this paper we review the forest kindergartens and Skogsmulle programs (Swedish outdoor programs) as well as the formally registered early childhood services in Japan. All of these different service types are known to include nature-based activities for young children. The formally registered early childhood services are subject to national guidelines (CAO et al. 2017, MEXT 2017, MHLW 2017) that require nature-based activities to promote children’s development. However, these guidelines fall short on matters of global sustainability, environmental issues, environmental education (EE), or education for sustainability (EfS), thus we argue a comprehensive approach is lacking and a gap in practices evident. We suggest that the two alternative service types, forest kindergartens and Skogsmulle programs, offer more potential to promote EE/EfS than the formally registered early childhood services. We also briefly review Australian early childhood policies and settings and identify a similar situation, where nature-based activities appear to deflect from a comprehensive approach to EE/EfS. We argue that a critical analysis of policies and improvement of pre-service and in-service teacher programs to build sustainability knowledge and pedagogical skills is required. Also the establishment of collective professional networks across the varied nature-based activity programs and service types is necessary across each nation to transform existing nature-based activities into effective EE/EfS approaches and practices for global sustainability. We also identify this review paper as a precursor to further research in this topical area.