Blue Spaces: Coastal Areas as a Teaching Context for Setting Aside Technologization in Early Childhood Sustainability Education

Humanity is at a critical juncture in its response to environmental issues. Coastal land spaces are under threat from rising sea levels and storm surges accelerating erosion and degradation. Children have an important role in sustaining a viable environmental future. Education for sustainability in early childhood (EC) nature-based settings has the potential to disrupt the current crisis by deepening children’s understanding of the environment. Many educators who practice nature pedagogy in early childhood education (ECE) shy away from using technological tools despite our existence in a time of artificial intelligence and digitalisation, some of which is becoming evident in EC sustainability education. This paper will consider the use of blue spaces that incorporate the waters, sands, and coastal land adjacent to the water’s age for EC sustainability teaching and learning. It will focus on questioning the role of technologization, particularly technological tools, on the forms of sustainability education that preschool children experience while in nature-based settings. Interrogating recent research of nature-based kindergartens undertaken at Australian coastal contexts, and drawing on seminal international documentation, it will focus on the development of young children’s empathy and ‘ethos of care’ for living things, their considerations of local ecosystems, and their growing understandings of the interrelationships between elements of their environment. The paper will then consider how the application of technological tools intersects with sustainability education in the context of blue spaces. The research highlights the importance of the educator in the development of interactive, learner-centred opportunities that not only enable investigative, action-adapted learning but also fosters independent learners who are responsive to their natural environment. The implication of this research is that further considerations of technologization and children’s environmental agency through a play-based, emergent curriculum are necessary.