“Involve me” is offered here as an expression of childhood wisdom and agency. Its earliest adult attribution is in : “Tell me and I forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand” (Xunji, 310-238 BCE). The statement acknowledges the fact that children learn more from doing things with an adult, rather than simply being told what to do, and also that they learn from our adult values and behaviour.
The Audit link on this website provides a checklist that is offered as a first step towards developing your Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship curriculum development plans. As a diagnostic tool it may be applied to identify priority areas for your curriculum development. The ‘UNESCO Curriculum‘ blog recommendations also offer some initial ideas for supporting each area of Knowledge and Understanding. In an effort to support personalised individual and small group educational application, each blog is also tagged to show the most relevant cognitive schemes (See ‘Play Schemes‘).
The nature of early childhood learning and development demand that early childhood education is ‘play based’, ‘child centred’ and personalised. A wide range of popular early learning models, including Reggio Emelia, Montessori, Froebel, High Scope, SchemaPlay, the Modern Education Movement (MEM) and Play Responsive Teaching, all provide practical support for preschools in implementing this approach. At their best, and in their different ways ,they each provide support for early educators concerned to support the child in their free-flow play while provocatively extending and seeding this play through the introduction of new resources, adult modelling, ideas or actions. The early childhood curriculum is an ongoing co-construction involving parents, professional educators, the state, and the local communities.
Our ‘Emergent Science Education’ curriculum checklist identifies the learning foundations that will support children when they the address the Age 5+ provisions of the UNESCO (2024) Greening Schools Curriculum. A Path made in the Walking (Hindmarch and Boyd Eds., 2021) provides another useful (and free to download) introduction to such practice in the context of Forest School Education.
Activities that have been planned to extend and support the learning of an individual or a small group of children often provide important learning opportunities for the wider peer group of ‘vicarious learners’ in the preschool setting. In the context of learning language and literacy, we know that future learning outcomes are largely determined at an early age by the quality of the language and literacy environment that the child experiences in the home and preschool. This applies equally to education for sustainable development and Parent Partnerships and preschool support in developing the Home Learning Environment is considered crucial. Children adopt the habits and behaviours of the adults that they grow up with, and it will always be our adult modelling of sustainable behaviours that are the most influential. The crucial role that parent’s and the wider community play in early learning and development provides a guiding pathway for education and schooling more generally. Our general approach to climate change education must therefore be multi-generational. As the African aphorism has it; ‘It Takes A Village to Raise a Child’.
The Involve Me project has been engaged for more than a decade in supporting adults and children sharing reading, and their use of Picture Story Books, Computers and Handheld devices together. Increasingly this work has been carried out in the context of developing support for Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship, as a contribution towards realising the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The project team combines expertise from both information science and early childhood education, comprising:
Hui-Yun is an Assistant Professor at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from Loughborough University, UK. Her research interest focuses on public libraries, community engagement, information literacy, and early childhood education.
John is visiting Professor at the National Chung Hsing University. He is also an Executive Member of OMEP UK, and he co-founded SchemaPlay and The Land of Me . John has researched and published widely on the subject of early childhood education, following his early childhood education research review of the UNESCO Decade for Education for Sustainable development, he chaired the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) for Sustainable Development workshop at the 2015 UNESCO ‘End of Decade’ ESD Conference in Nagoya, Japan.
- Joyce Wen – Research Assistant
Joyce Wen is currently doing a M.A. degree at the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan Normal University.
Involve Me 