Early Years Education in the Anthropocene: An Ecophenomenology of Children’s Experience

The intersections of early years curriculum, pedagogy, policy and their research must now confront two seemingly intractable but mutually constitutive global problems within their materially ‘grounded’ geocultural-historical circumstances and conditions. The ‘lives’ of children embedded in the socioecological contexts of families, homes, meals, schools, playgrounds and neighbourhoods are ‘fast’ (dromosphere) ‘heating up’ (Anthropocene). Without alternatives, the accelerating and intensifying consequences are deeply disturbing. This chapter addresses a vital need in early childhood education and research. There is a compelling ‘early intervention’ warrant for critical problem identification, theory building, methodological innovation and empirically qualified insights into the increasingly vulnerable body~time~space scapes of childhood in the now complex, accelerated, climactic and abstracted/digitalized ‘everyday’ of their precariously ‘lived experiences’. Empirically informed theoretical development of an environmental education and its ecopedagogies capable of slowly sustaining an intergenerational ethic is overdue. This chapter anticipates the formatively sensitive development of an experience-rich education (and research within it) that is ecopedagogically meaningful to children’s immersion in various body~time~space scapes in, and with, a still vibrant nature that, in so doing, critically (en)counters the deeply problematic dromospherical advent of the Anthropocene.