Outdoors, Nature, and Sustainability: An Analysis of Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education and Care Across Norway, Denmark, China, and the United States of America

In this article, we explore how national curriculum guidelines for early childhood education and care stipulate practices of early childhood education institutions in education for sustainability through a cross-cultural analysis of the latest curriculum guidelines in Norway, Denmark, China, and the United States of America (the USA). The analysis focuses on the concepts of outdoors, nature, and sustainability. Our study reveals that while outdoors is mentioned equally frequently across countries, nature is more frequently mentioned in Nordic countries and China than in the USA. Sustainability is the least mentioned across all countries, with no mention in the Chinese and American curriculum guidelines. Mentions of outdoors and nature are connected to the ecological, social and cultural, and political dimensions of sustainability, with the economic dimension rarely mentioned. Our findings also indicate that the curriculum guidelines in the four countries are anthropocentric, rather than ecocentric. We propose that the concepts of the outdoors, nature, and sustainability be more explicitly and multidimensionally integrated into these national curriculum guidelines. We also call for a shift from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective in formulating national curriculum guidelines, as these guidelines serve as foundational references for local governments and early childhood education institutions when developing their local curricula.