https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949120981787 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 1 –11 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1463949120981787 journals.sagepub.com/home/cie
A review of research on the
Anthropocene in early childhood
education
Hanna Sjögren
Malmö University, Sweden
Abstract
This literature review describes and analyses 19 peer-reviewed scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2020 that focus on the notion of the Anthropocene in early childhood education. The review is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts stemming from environmental history and the sociology of childhood. The results of the analyses are presented under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how these children pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. The review concludes by noting research gaps in the current literature that would benefit from further analysis in future studies in the early childhood education field.
Keywords
Anthropocene, early childhood education, environmental education, literature review
The notion of the Anthropocene has emerged from the geological sciences and made its way into the field of education (Jickling et al., 2018; Lloro-Bidart, 2015). In brief, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch imprinted by human action on the surface of Earth. The concept of the Anthropocene is contested and criticized, but it has nevertheless made its way from the natural sciences into the social sciences and humanities (Grusin, 2017). Scholars argue that the concept redefines academic disciplines that have previously focused solely on the human species (Horn and Bergthaller, 2020). Several have argued that the Anthropocene redefines and reconfigures the rela-tion between human cultures and ‘nature’, with vast consequences for grand quesrela-tions such as what it means to be human (Bird Rose et al., 2012; Chakrabarty, 2015; Horn and Bergthaller, 2020). As such, the Anthropocene has consequences for education and its purpose of educating future generations through the establishment of human temporalities – that is, relations between the past, present and future (Lysgaard et al., 2019). In this article, I regard it as particularly impor-tant to consider how the value-laden relation between children and nature is (re)configured in light Corresponding author:
Hanna Sjögren, Department of Childhood, Education and Society, Malmö University, Jacob Bagges gata 2, Malmö 211 19, Sweden.
Email: hanna.sjogren@mau.se
of the Anthropocene. An important assumption for such investigations is that the constructions of childhood at any given time are always ideological, with ‘a set of meanings which serve to rational-ize, to sustain or to challenge existing relationships of power between adults and children, and indeed between adults themselves’ (Buckingham, 2000: 11). This also applies to the academic fields that participate in the construction and reconstruction of contemporary childhoods. Wishes, fears, and morally infused opinions and judgments have been projected on children throughout modernity, and continue to be (Jenks, 2005). The imperatives stemming from these wishes, fears and opinions are more often than not taken up in and through education (e.g. Huckle and Wals, 2015; Ideland, 2019; Lindgren and Öhrfelt, 2019). Now that the notion of the Anthropocene has entered the field of early childhood education (ECE), it is time to investigate the kinds of research problems and focuses emerging from recent scholarly efforts in relation to the Anthropocene.
Research at the intersection of ECE and the Anthropocene is still emerging, and a systematic review of the field is lacking. Previous reviews of the field have focused on research related to political goals about sustainability and sustainable development (Davis, 2009; Hedefalk et al., 2015; Somerville and Williams, 2015). In response to this gap, I offer a systematic review of the research published so far at the intersection of ECE and the Anthropocene. Given the claim that the Anthropocene redefines education, I consider it important to critically investigate, first, whether that is the case and, second, how such redefinitions are formulated.
The aim of this review is to describe and analyse peer-reviewed articles on the subject of the Anthropocene in ECE. I ask the following research questions:
•
• How do ECE researchers define the Anthropocene? •
• How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles? •
• What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?
In what follows, I present a brief history of the notion of the Anthropocene in relation to education. Second, I introduce the analytical concepts guiding the analysis. Third, I present the review method. I then attend to the results of the analysis under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how they pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. Lastly, I present the conclusions of the review, and certain research gaps in the ECE field are addressed.
A brief history of the notion of the Anthropocene in relation to
education
The notion of the Anthropocene is often traced back to the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chem-ist Paul Crutzen, who made the concept famous in the early 2000s. Crutzen (2006) concluded that human activities have grown to the extent that they have become significant geological forces (see also Steffen et al., 2007). After some 120,000 years of the Holocene, it is claimed that we are now in the Anthropocene, an era in which the Earth’s surface is imprinted by human activities. The Anthropocene is defined as a geological epoch determined by the effects of the activities of the human species on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including but not limited to anthropogenic climate change (Waters et al., 2016). Although the causes of specific environmental changes are debated and criticized (e.g. see Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2017; Ruddiman, 2018), natu-ral scientists agree that the Earth’s climate is changing and that this environmental change will have severe consequences for our everyday lives (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
2018). The Anthropocene is itself claimed to be ‘an interruption’ from which there is no return (Horn and Bergthaller, 2020). As such, humankind as a geological force contributes to new and emerging questions about the relationship between nature and culture, and the agency and respon-sibility of the human species for the development and well-being of non-human species on Earth. This development also forces us to rethink the purpose of education (Lysgaard et al., 2019).
Conceptualizations of the nature of children and the nature of
education
The review below is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts. These concepts stem from differ-ent fields and are used together to address a research problem positioned at the intersection of ECE and the Anthropocene. The first pair of concepts is homo and anthropos, developed by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2015). The second pair is the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child, developed by sociologist of childhood Chris Jenks (2005). This combination of analytical concepts from two distinct disciplines permits investigation, in this article, of the relationship between the categories ‘the nature of children’ and ‘the nature of education’.
First, Chakrabarty (2015) introduced the distinction between homo and anthropos to clarify the different yet mutually existing ways of viewing what the human is in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene does not have moral value in itself, Chakrabarty claims, merely being a scientific category from the geological sciences. Homo refers to the human as a cultural being, differentiated by social identities and categories as other than nature. Anthropos refers to humans as one of many biological species on Earth, albeit one central to the current geological period. In other words, these two terms denote different ways of viewing human agency in relation to the natural world. At the same time, Chakrabarty (2015: 165) points out that homo and anthropos are intertwined, and that the two definitions are ‘a pragmatic and artificial distinction through which . . . to capture the two figures of the human that discussions on climate change help us to imagine’. Here, I use the distinction as one of two pairs of analytical concepts to study how ECE researchers define the Anthropocene and what the human is in this epoch. The concepts of anthropos and homo serve as a theoretical foundation for answering the first and second research questions: ‘How do ECE researchers define the Anthropocene?’ and ‘How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles?’
Second, Jenks (2005) conceives of two central and mythical images of children and childhood: the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child. Jenks suggests that these images, although incompat-ible, exist alongside each other in contemporary western societies. The Dionysian child captures the inherently impish child, inclined to harbour evil and related to the Christian belief in Adam’s original sin. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories of the psychological life of infants and small children draw on similar understandings of children’s nature as originally corrupted. This particular understanding of the child dictates certain behaviours towards children, and includes the imperative for strict rules imposed on children by parents, guardians and teachers. The concept of the Apollonian child, on the other hand, stems from the child in Rousseau’s Émile. In Christian terms, this child belongs to humankind before Eve ate the apple. The image of the Apollonian child depicts children as born good and with unique potential. Parents, guardians and teachers are sup-posed to encourage, facilitate and enable children. There is also a tendency to worship children and childhood for their assumed goodness. Although Jenks (2005: 65) notes that the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child are just images, he stresses that they are nonetheless powerful: ‘they live on and give force to the different discourses that we have about children’. At first glance, the Apollonian child is what we encounter in public western discourses on children and childhood.
However, Jenks is probably right in claiming that the image of the Dionysian child is lurking some-where alongside that of the Apollonian child. This observation might be particularly accurate in relation to the Anthropocene, where humankind is perceived as both causing damage and unable to act on planetary forces. Although children are perceived as innocent and close to nature (Jenks, 2005), the parenting and guardian styles needed to guide children in life within the Anthropocene might differ from the imperative of encouragement and facilitation. I use the distinction between the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child as a conceptual pair to study how ECE researchers make sense of education in relation to children in the Anthropocene. These two concepts provide a theoretical foundation for answering the third research question: ‘What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?’
Review method
I searched for articles for the present review in May and June 2020. The purpose was to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles on the subject of the Anthropocene in the field of ECE. Books, book chapters, book reviews and editorials were excluded from this review. First, I used the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, were I applied the keywords ‘Anthropocene AND early childhood’. This search resulted in seven hits. Second, I used the Libsearch database, which enabled me to search, simultaneously, almost everything in the databases of my university library, including books, journal articles and e-books. I conditioned the search by requesting only peer-reviewed articles and using the keywords ‘Anthropocene AND early childhood education’. This resulted in 20 hits, some of which were duplicates. I also conducted a search for ‘Anthropocene AND early childhood’, which resulted in 24 hits, some of which were duplicates. Through this method, I found one additional article that did not appear in the previous searches. Using similar keywords, I found one additional article when searching for articles using the search engine Google Scholar. For reliability, I repeated the same searches in June 2020, when I found two additional articles. Shortly afterwards, in June 2020, the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education published a special issue on ‘Childhood studies and the Anthropocene’, containing six peer-reviewed articles. In all, I found and read 24 unique articles. Five of these were removed from the present review: one of these five turned out to be a book review and the remaining four focused either on education or childhood in relation to the Anthropocene, but not the two in combination. The selected articles were all published between 2015 and 2020. In all, I present and analyse 19 unique articles in the review below. These articles were found in the journals listed in Table 1.
I first read through and categorized all of the articles based on the keywords and theoretical perspectives and methods used. Second, I categorized and analysed all of the articles, first, by pos-ing the three research questions to the articles and, second, by applypos-ing the four analytical concepts to selected excerpts relating to the respective research questions. The analysis resulted in two main analytical findings, which are presented below under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’.
Entangled children of the Anthropocene
How do researchers in ECE define the Anthropocene? The reviewed articles typically draw on definitions of the Anthropocene that are very closely tied to the scientific discourse on the epoch. For example, Ritchie (2015: 41) writes that the Anthropocene era is one ‘where human induced climate changes are disrupting the planet’s systems, threatening the survival of not only humans, but of eco-systems and the earth’s biodiversity’, while Nxumalo (2017: 559) writes that the Anthropocene is ‘the current epoch of humans as fossil-fuelled planetary force’. Since 2018, other
more critical concepts have emerged as well, such as Haraway’s (2015) ‘Chthulucene’ (e.g. see Duhn and Galvez, 2020: 731; Murris et al., 2018: 29), the ‘racial Capitalocene’ (Nxumalo and ross, 2019) and the ‘Capitalocene’ (Duhn and Galvez, 2020: 731). Taylor (2020: 342) specifically cites the feminist critique of ‘the capital A “Anthropos” (Greek for capital M Man) of the Anthropocene nomenclature as a problematic phallogocentric signifier that risks perpetuating a particularly dan-gerous form of human-centric conceit’. These alternative concepts are suggested to emphasize a critique of the universal human. It is evident that the notion of the Anthropocene has emerged and engaged ECE scholars over the past five years. However, there seems to be some recent hesitation around the notion of the Anthropocene from feminist and anticolonial perspectives. Whether the concept of the Anthropocene will prevail or be replaced by something else in ECE is an open ques-tion at this point.
How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles? In the reviewed literature, children and nature are typically described as ‘interdependent’ (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015: 507), ‘entangled’ (Weldemariam, 2020: 405), ‘relational’ (Wals, 2017: 162), ‘connected’ (Nxumalo, 2017: 560), and so forth. The argument goes that our species is in deep trouble due to knowledge production that has built on ‘the nature/culture divide that has contrib-uted to the challenges of the Anthropocene, and maintains anthropocentric visions of nature’s inno-cent child’ (Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017: 1415). Current and previous knowledge practices around children’s relationships with nature are described as flawed due to a strong belief in human exceptionalism (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015: 510) and the nature/culture separa-tion (Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017: 1415). Commonly used terms include ‘more-than-human’ (Jiang, 2018; Nxumalo, 2018; Ritchie, 2015; Rooney, 2019; Weldemariam, 2020), ‘multispecies relations’ (Merewether, 2019; Nxumalo, 2018; Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), ‘assemblages’ (e.g. Jiang, 2018; Murris et al., 2018), ‘intra-actions’ (Duhn and Galvez, 2020; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016; Somerville and Powell, 2019) and ‘more-than-social’ (e.g. Mycock, 2020). It seems reasonable to assume that the claims of entanglement and enmeshment are ‘fashionable’ (Malm, 2019: 156) in research on the Anthropocene in ECE. Malm (2019) uses the term ‘fashionable’ to criticize the hybridism between nature and society popularized in Bruno Latour’s writing (e.g. see Latour, 1993).
Table 1. Journals included in the review.
Education journals Number
of articles
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Environmental Education Research
Race Ethnicity and Education Journal of Pedagogy
Educational Philosophy and Theory Education Sciences
Pedagogy, Culture & Society
3 3 1 1 1 1 1 Early childhood journals
Journal of Early Childhood Research Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood International Journal of Early Childhood Journal of Childhood Studies
Children’s Geographies
Journal of Childhoods and Pedagogies
1 1 1 1 3 1 Total 19
These perspectives, from the posthumanities and new materialism, highlight the impossibility of separating culture from nature and emphasize that these categories are always entangled and co-constituted in different ways. Our understanding of the intertwined relationships between nature and culture can be interpreted through the lens of Chakrabarty’s notion of anthropos, which refers to the human as just one of many biological species on Earth.
All but one of the reviewed articles built fully or partly on perspectives from the posthumanities and new materialism. These perspectives can be said to have dominated scholarship on the Anthropocene in ECE thus far (Duhn and Galvez, 2020; Jiang, 2018; Merewether, 2019; Murris et al., 2018; Mycock, 2020; Nxumalo, 2017, 2018; Nxumalo and Ketchabaw, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016; Ritchie, 2015; Rooney, 2019; Somerville and Powell, 2019; Taylor, 2017, 2020; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015; Wals, 2017; Weldemariam, 2020). Notably, this was the route suggested in a previous literature review on sustainability education in early childhood (Somerville and Williams, 2015).
However, one reviewed article explicitly applies a different understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene compared with the other articles. Here, the unequal relations between black and white people and the ‘antiblackness in schooling’ (Nxumalo and ross, 2019: 502) are taken as the point of departure for an analysis of children’s relationships with the environ-ment. The authors join in with a critique of ‘the term Anthropocene and its mobilizations, particu-larly in relation to the reinforcement of universalist discourses that ignore the originary and ongoing injustices of the Anthropocene’ (Nxumalo and ross, 2019: 506). Nxumalo and ross (2019: 505) claim that ‘an underlying hierarchical view of Black and other economically marginalized urban children versus other children with presumably “normal” relations to nature’ is left unproblema-tized. Rather than focusing on collapsing and questioning the dualism between nature and culture, the authors focus on critiquing the reproduction of racial inequalities. Although indigenous knowl-edges are hailed in several of the articles (e.g. Ritchie, 2015; Taylor, 2017), Nxumalo and ross (2019) are the only ones taking as their point of departure the problematization of unequal relations between humans. Chakrabarty’s (2015) notion of homo refers to the human as a cultural being, differentiated by social identities and categories and considered ‘other’ relative to nature. It could be argued that Nxumalo and ross (2019) introduce the differentiated human into the ECE literature on the Anthropocene. Although it is understandable that considerable attention is paid to the inter-connectedness of nature and culture, there are also reasons for critically questioning what is over-looked when children (plural) are constructed as anthropos and entangled with nature .
Wolff et al. (2020: 14) have explicitly claimed that posthumanism is an approach that raises some as-yet-unresolved problems in relation to ECE, noting that it ‘seems difficult to take care of and educate small children if they are not allowed to have a centric position’. Apart from the pos-sible problem of decentring children in institutions where they arguably should have an important voice, there indeed seem to be reasons for critically questioning what is overlooked when power differences between humans are left out. Human ecologist Andreas Malm (2019: 156) has argued from a critical Marxist position for the importance of sifting ‘out the social components from the natural, if we wish to understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them’. A central question for Malm is what we can see and change if we focus solely on questioning and transgressing boundaries. What we miss when the sole focus is on entanglements and enmesh-ments is a question worthy of further critical attention, also within ECE.
As shown above, efforts have been made in the literature to rethink conventional understand-ings of the relations between children and nature. In the scholarly literature so far, considerable attention has been paid to commenting on and criticizing earlier conceptualizations of the separa-tion between children and nature. However, other critical perspectives that take into account the inequalities between humans have been largely absent. In very recent years, however, other critical
concepts, such as the ‘Chthulucene’ and ‘Capitalocene’, have made their way into studies of ECE on the Anthropocene. The above analysis points to the importance of not forgetting that the anthro-pos consists of homo – that is, differentiated human beings with very different access to resources and power. In the words of Lindgren and Öhrfelt (2019: 301), there is a risk of ‘the posthumanist discourse . . . articulat[ing] the child as “orphan”, paradoxically detaching the child from its sub-jectivity and social and historical past’.
Extraordinary children of the Anthropocene
What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles? Most of the reviewed arti-cles call for teaching children to learn better with/in relation to nature. Human exceptionalism is recognized and problematized in previous and contemporary attempts at and practices of environ-mental education (Nxumalo, 2018; e.g. see Taylor, 2017). Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw write:
We want young children to sense and register, in more than cognitive ways, that it is never just about ‘us’. And we also want to stay open to the possibility that other species and life forms shape us in ways that exceed our ability to fully comprehend. (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015: 512)
The way in which education is prompted recalls the assumption that young children must be taught a caring sensibility towards life forms other than humans. Encounters with a ‘multiplicity of differ-ent worlds’ is assumed to foster ‘agency, care and empathy’ (Wals, 2017: 162). This conceptualiza-tion of the child recalls Jenks’ (2005) noconceptualiza-tion of the Dionysian child, the originally sinful human who needs close monitoring and training to become good. The virtue of caring for the non-human world does seem to emerge through a certain kind of education.
Against the need to intervene through education stands another, opposing, conceptualization of children in many of the review articles: extraordinary children. Children understood in this way seem to have the potential to offer adults insights into ‘alternative ways of becoming with matter’ (Merewether, 2019: 106) and to possess extraordinary qualities: ‘children are already practicing this form of collective thinking and looking beyond the human/nature divide to cross its boundary set by adults’ (Jiang, 2018: 5).
Moreover, Taylor (2020: 345) writes: ‘It is precisely because pre-school aged children are less likely to have learned the “rules” of the “Man vs Nature” game (as Le Guin puts it) that I find their relations with wildlife so illuminating’. Children inhabit something extraordinary, which adults rarely have access to. In the words of Merewether (2019: 106): ‘young children’s nuanced and sensitive listening to their multispecies surroundings has potential to alert the humanist-trained adults’. These and similar descriptions of the nature of children in the Anthropocene recall Jenks’ image of the Apollonian child, depicted as born good and possessing unique potential. The role of teachers of the Apollonian child is to encourage, facilitate and enable the child’s unique and beauti-ful capacities. Here we also see a tendency to worship children.
Contrary to the understanding of children emerging in some of the reviewed articles, adults are typically constructed as Dionysian characters of ignorance and blindness:
adults’ habitual ways of seeing may preclude us from being attentive to the agentic capacity of the material. Rather than dismissing, ignoring or trying to reshape them, adults can join with and learn from young children’s everyday multispecies kin-making with bodies such as puddles. (Merewether, 2019: 114)
It is a low-key, ordinary, everyday kind of response that values and trusts the generative and recuperative powers of small and seemingly insignificant worldly relations infinitely more than it does the heroic tropes of human rescue and salvation narratives. These are the kinds of non-divisive relations that many young children already have with the world. They are full of small achievements. We can learn with them. (Taylor, 2017: 1458–1459)
In the above quotation, Taylor specifically mentions ‘non-divisive relations’ as something that children, rather than adults, have access to. The knowledge needed in the Anthropocene is, it seems, the knowledge that unspoiled children already have. Nxumalo (2017: 566) writes that peda-gogies in the Anthropocene should build on ‘perspectives that children are often already embody-ing and contemplatembody-ing’. In one way, children might be considered more suitable and knowledgeable than adults for a life in the Anthropocene. According to Wals (2017: 158), children lose this status as they grow older: ‘children’s innate capacities to care, show empathy, explore, sense and create . . . are capacities that they tragically seem to lose as they grow older and spend more time in schools’.
The reviewed articles generally express critical opinions regarding mainstream educational ideas and institutions; this applies both to articles depicting children as Dionysian and to those depicting them as Apollonian. In the case of Apollonian children, however, it seems reasonable to believe that children in the Anthropocene might almost do better without what they learn through education. The construction of the extraordinary child seems to depict the educated adult as cor-rupted, while not-yet-educated children are seen as those holding the knowledge we need in order to exist in the Anthropocene. A further conceptualization of what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene seems to be needed in order to take the discussion further and develop the field of ECE.
Concluding discussion
This review article has sought to describe and analyse peer-reviewed articles on the subject of ECE in the Anthropocene. I asked the following research questions:
•
• How do researchers in ECE define the Anthropocene? •
• How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles? •
• What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?
In the reviewed research, the scientific notion of the Anthropocene is often taken at face value and as the point of departure in most studies, though a few studies since 2018 engage with alternative notions such as the ‘Chthulucene’ and ‘Capitalocene’. It is evident that the notion of the Anthropocene has emerged and engaged ECE scholars during the past five years. However, I also noted some recent hesitation in using the notion of the Anthropocene, with critique coming from feminist and anticolonial perspectives.
The reviewed research shows that the figure of the entangled child is largely based on an under-standing of the child as anthropos – that is, seen as one of many biological species on Earth. Thus, the relationship between nature and the child is most commonly described as entangled. I found that a few studies draw on the notion of homo, instead making the unequal relations between humans the object of study. Here, I identified a visible research gap that merits further attention. Furthermore, the reviewed research shows that the figure of the extraordinary child draws on the images of both the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child.
Concerning the ideas about the purpose of education proposed through the reviewed articles, I found that there seems to be a tendency in the literature to romanticize children as
essentially different from adults. This construction depicts the educated adult as corrupted, while not-yet-educated children become those holding the proper knowledge our species needs in order to exist in the Anthropocene. It is worth contemplating what this romantic picture brings about for children in education. Does it create a sense of responsibility for what adults have been unable to complete and comprehend, as suggested in Ideland’s (2019) critical study of the ‘eco-certified child’? It seems as though, for the past five years, researchers interested in environmental concerns in ECE have been following Somerville and Williams’ (2015: 102) advice that ‘it is recommended that new post-human frameworks recently applied in early childhood education research could use-fully be connected to researching early childhood education for planetary sustainability’. What we miss when the sole focus is on the entanglements and enmeshments central to the posthuman frame-work is a question that is worthy of further critical attention, also within ECE.
This review shows that it is worth critically investigating the ideas produced and circulated by scientific research, and contemplating what is overlooked when many researchers focus on simi-lar research problems and theoretical points of departure. The notion of the Anthropocene has emerged from the geological sciences and made its way into the field of education and ECE. Although a lot of important work has been conducted so far, the field of ECE would benefit from multiple perspectives and from multiple methods for investigating what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hanna Hofverberg and Baki Cakici for their helpful comments on the first draft of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who contributed with insightful and detailed comments on the article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Hanna Sjögren https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4833-8292
References
Bird Rose D, Van Dooren T, Chrulew M, et al. (2012) Thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities. Environmental Humanities 1(1): 1–5.
Buckingham D (2000) After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Chakrabarty D (2015) The human condition in the Anthropocene. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale University, 18–19 February. Available at: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Chakrabarty%20manu-script.pdf
Crutzen PJ (2006) The ‘Anthropocene’. In: Ehlers E and Krafft T (eds) Earth System Science in the
Anthropocene. Berlin: Springer, pp. 13–18.
Davis J (2009) Revealing the research ‘hole’ of early childhood education for sustainability: A preliminary survey of the literature. Environmental Education Research 15(2): 227–241.
Duhn I and Galvez S (2020) Doing curious research to cultivate tentacular becomings. Environmental
Education Research 26(5): 731–741.
Grusin RA (2017) Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway DJ (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental
Humanities 6: 159–165.
Hedefalk M, Almqvist J and Östman L (2015) Education for sustainable development in early childhood edu-cation: A review of the research literature. Environmental Education Research 21(7): 975–990. Horn E and Bergthaller H (2020) The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. New York: Routledge.
Huckle J and Wals AEJ (2015) The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: Business as usual in the end. Environmental Education Research 21(3): 491–505.
Ideland M (2019) The Eco-Certified Child: Citizenship and Education for Sustainability and Environment. Cham : Palgrave Macmillan.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) Global warming of 1.5 °C. Available at: http://www.ipcc. ch/report/sr15/ (accessed 3 May 2019).
Jenks C (2005) Childhood. London: Routledge.
Jiang L (2018) Reconceptualizing nature in the Anthropocene – towards learning with place: A literature review. Journal of Childhoods and Pedagogies 1(3). Available at: https://journals.sfu.ca/jcp/index.php/ jcp/article/view/31 (accessed 16 June 2020).
Jickling B, Blenkinsop S, Timmerman N, et al. (2018) Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-negotiating
Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. Cham Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lindgren T and Öhrfelt MS (2019) Orphans of our common worlds. Educational Theory 69(3): 283–303. Lloro-Bidart T (2015) A political ecology of education in/for the Anthropocene. Environment and Society
6(1): 128–148.
Lysgaard JA, Bengtsson S and Laugesen MH-L (2019) Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the
Anthropocene. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Malm A (2019) Against hybridism: Why we need to distinguish between nature and society, now more than ever. Historical Materialism 27(2): 156–187.
Malm A and Hornborg A (2014) The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative.
Anthropocene Review 1(1): 62–69.
Merewether J (2019) New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: Murmurative diffractions.
Children’s Geographies 17(1): 105–117.
Moore JW (2017) The Capitalocene, part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. Journal of
Peasant Studies 44(3): 594–630.
Murris K, Reynolds R-A and Peers J (2018) Reggio Emilia inspired philosophical teacher education in the Anthropocene: Posthuman child and the family (tree). Journal of Childhood Studies 43(1): 15–29. Mycock K (2020) Forest schools: Moving towards an alternative pedagogical response to the Anthropocene?
Discourse 41(3): 427–440.
Nxumalo F (2017) Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances. Children’s
Geographies 15(5): 558–569.
Nxumalo F (2018) Stories for living on a damaged planet: Environmental education in a preschool classroom.
Journal of Early Childhood Research 16(2): 148–159.
Nxumalo F and Pacini-Ketchabaw V (2017) ‘Staying with the trouble’ in child-insect-educator common worlds. Environmental Education Research 23(10): 1414–1426.
Nxumalo F and ross km (2019) Envisioning black space in environmental education for young children. Race
Ethnicity and Education 22(4): 502–524.
Pacini-Ketchabaw V and Kummen K (2016) Shifting temporal frames in children’s common worlds in the Anthropocene. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17(4): 431–441.
Ritchie J (2015) Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective. Journal of Pedagogy 6(2): 41–56.
Rooney T (2019) Weathering time: Walking with young children in a changing climate. Children’s
Geographies 17(2): 177–189.
Ruddiman WF (2018) Three flaws in defining a formal ‘Anthropocene’. Progress in Physical Geography:
Earth and Environment 42(4): 451–461.
Somerville M and Powell SJ (2019) Thinking posthuman with mud: And children of the Anthropocene.
Educational Philosophy and Theory 51(8): 829–840.
Somerville M and Williams C (2015) Sustainability education in early childhood: An updated review of research in the field. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 16(2): 102–117.
Steffen W, Crutzen PJ and McNeill JR (2007) The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36(8): 614–621.
Taylor A (2017) Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental
Education Research 23(10): 1448–1461.
Taylor A (2020) Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players.
Discourse 41(3): 340–358.
Taylor A and Pacini-Ketchabaw V (2015) Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 23(4): 507–529.
Wals AEJ (2017) Sustainability by default: Co-creating care and relationality through early childhood educa-tion. International Journal of Early Childhood 49(2): 155–164.
Waters CN, Zalasiewicz J, Summerhayes C, et al. (2016) The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphi-cally distinct from the Holocene. Science 351(6269): aad2622.
Weldemariam K (2020) ‘Becoming-with bees’: Generating affect and response-abilities with the dying bees in early childhood education. Discourse 41(3): 391–406.
Wolff L-A, Skarstein TH and Skarstein F (2020) The mission of early childhood education in the Anthropocene.
Education Sciences 10: Article 27. Available at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1245589 (accessed 11 May
2020).
Author biography
Hanna Sjögren (PhD) is an Associate Senior Lecturer in the Department of Childhood, Education and Society at Malmö University, Sweden. Her research interests concern how people in education understand and inter-pret environmental change as an entangled cultural, societal and scientific phenomenon.
