Worldcare pedagogy: a main challenge in early years education

The aim of this chapter is to propose a pedagogical framework for sustainability education in ECEC, based on a synthesis of a cultural-historical wholeness approach and care ethics. We suggest the relevant domains of care in ECEC as consisting of: We-care, self-care, other-care and world-care. The practical implication of this pedagogical framework is still in the making through a collaborative research project and this chapter presents the theoretical underpinnings and preliminary results with integrating world-care into the practice of ECEC and unpacking the dilemmas, contradictions and possibilities in such a green transformation of early education. We suggest that the goal of ECEC is not primarily to satisfy individual needs, but to support and promote we-care in a common life unfolding, which animates a critical reappraisal of how to understand human needs in relation to ECEC from a wholeness approach. This underlines the social ontology of co-dependency and re-opens the human-nature divide in a world-caring pedagogy that includes the other-than-human and admits to an expanded care ethics.