Young children’s environmental meaning-making through lived experiences, family practices and community contexts: Through Tagorean lens

Burgeoning anthropogenic activities are intensifying climate- and environmental-related risks, disproportionately affecting young children in rural contexts of the Global South. In India, where everyday life is closely intertwined with environmental degradation, water scarcity, and pollution, young children’s perspectives on these issues remain underexplored. This article, a part of an ongoing doctoral study, explores how young children aged four to six in a rural Indian Anganwadi express their environmental understanding and experience. The study is grounded in the educational philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, within a blended interpretivist-constructivist paradigm. Using purposive sampling, 17 children were recruited with parental consent, with participation varying between 14 and 16 children across the three Draw-and-Tell sessions. Data were generated through children’s drawings and accompanying narratives. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, enabling the identification of the patterns while attending to the researcher’s reflexive role in the analytic process. Following the analysis, six drawings were selected as illustrative examples of the themes identified across the broader dataset. Findings revealed three themes: children’s perceptions of their immediate environment, their awareness of environmental issues, and their ideas for environmental protection. Children’s environmental understandings were rooted in lived experiences, everyday practices, and local socio-ecological relationships, with emerging ideas of protecting the environment. Through Tagore’s philosophy, these findings highlight environmental learning as an interconnected process of experience, expression, reflection, and care. The study foregrounds children’s everyday environmental experiences and locally situated knowledge, amplifying Global South perspectives within early childhood environmental and sustainability education scholarship through a contextually grounded, child-centred approach.