Remembering and representing the wonder: Using narrative and arts-based reflection to connect pre-service early childhood teachers to significant ChildhoodNature encounters and their professional role

Early childhood educators are uniquely placed to support children’s ways of knowing and being, and to share in and respond to children’s wonder and understandings about childhoodnature encounters and relationships. The context of this chapter is a sustainability-focused course in an Australian undergraduate early childhood education teaching degree. As part of this course, two groups of 27 pre-service teachers used narrative and arts-based methods to explore personal childhoodnature experiences and memories. Supported by their stories and creative and historical artefacts, pre-service teachers remembered their childhood wonder of belonging to a universe—a universe they are part of and shape—but that extends beyond them (Bennett, 1994). This chapter highlights how pre-service teachers’ reflection and representation of their significant childhood experiences supported their subsequent communication of personal and professional commitments to working with young children in relational ways toward sustainable worlds (Rautio, 2013b). Remembering significant childhoodnature encounters assisted pre-service teachers’ articulation of conceptualised and embodied ideas about relationships, including their sense of belonging, wellbeing and connectedness to other people and the more than human world around them; and their physical, mental and spiritual health. Remembering the wonder has connected them afresh to their values and work as educators who recognise the significance of childhood experiences, the interconnectedness of human and more than human worlds, and early environments as places of being, belonging and becoming for children and families.