Becoming with the City: Children’s Opportunities of Education for Sustainability in Urban Areas

Abstract

This chapter explores the critical role of children’s participation in urban spaces as a key component of education for sustainability. Recently, children’s engagement with outdoor environments has decreased, particularly in Europe, diminishing their visibility in public spaces and weakening their ties to the community, conflicting with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Drawing from a case study from Èvora, Portugal, where Early Childhood Education (ECE) settings have increasingly incorporated the city into their pedagogical approaches aiming to enrich children’s experiences beyond the classroom, the study presented here used five in-depth interviews of ECE teachers to examines the motives, opportunities, and challenges associated with these practices. The theoretical framework is rooted in socio-cultural traditions, highlighting the significance of the city as a Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Haraway’s concepts of “becoming with” and “worlding,” where children co-create their worlds through interaction with both human and more-than-human entities. The chapter concludes by underscoring the potential of these practices to transform ECE, promoting children’s emotional and cognitive connection with the world, ecological awareness, children’s agency and response-ability, positioning them as active participants in their socio-cultural contexts, thereby contributing to a sustainable and interconnected urban ecosystem.