Sustainability education and social inclusion in Nordic early childhood education

This article explores the relations and tensions between sustainability education and social inclusion in the context of Nordic early childhood education. Based on ethnographic field studies of ecological sustainability education in socially vulnerable neighborhoods, we discuss how a focus on access to nature experiences and nature education appears to overlook societal mechanisms of exclusion, which frame and get entangled with sustainability education activities. This, we argue, becomes a barrier for inclusive sustainability education, but it also prevents attention being paid to ambivalent emotions connected with relations to nature that could be a key to developing further the content of early childhood sustainability education.