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Global environmental changes and substantial social justice issues are impacting all, raising significant concerns for the Earth's future. There is a need for equitable education as an avenue towards addressing these sustainability challenges. This qualitative content analysis study examined a representation of the concerns and interests of professionals involved in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS). We analyzed a conference document collated for the Transnational Dialogues in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability Research (TND) that included contributions from 60 educators and researchers from nineteen different countries. Three significant global and interrelated ECEfS themes emerged from the data: urgency, equity, and agency. The data indicate an urgent need for change as well as a much-needed push for equity alongside stakeholder concerns and interests in the role of children's agency. There was evidence of an inherent tension between child-centered and more teacher-centered pedagogies to achieve specific education for sustainability (EfS) goals. The findings have implications for applied EfS practices, co-operative research, and future investigations on a global scale.

Bhutan aspires to balance sustainable socioeconomic development with environmental conservation to achieve Gross National Happiness (GNH). There are apparent alignments between GNH and the principles of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), but we recognize the role of the Bhutanese socio-cultural context for critically examining any alignments or misalignments with pervasive Western action-oriented ESD approaches. We present one aspect of a PhD study by the lead author that explored the implementation of Environmental Science (ES) in Bhutanese secondary schools. He examined stakeholders' perceptions about action-oriented approaches to teaching, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with six principals, surveys and interviews with 14 teachers, surveys with 563 students and focus groups with 194 students. Findings indicated that students participated in school-based activities such as waste management and cleaning, in compliance with school-based directives to alleviate problems, rather than as a consequence of their own agentic decisions. Principals, teachers and students valued the idea of taking environmental action in ES, especially waste management, primarily for solving ecological issues and promoting intergenerational equity rather than for developing of action-competence. There is potential for leveraging existing school practices to enhance action-oriented approaches and, consequently, foster action-competence for the enhancement of GNH in Bhutan.

Organisational narratives are foundational to inform the actions and directions of an organisation. Modern organisations often place great weight and invest significant time crafting their narratives that are communicated through mission statements, strategic plans, policies, directives and self-promotion. Sometimes these narratives align with the lived reality of the workers and those who deal with the organisation, but at other times there is a significant gap, or even chasm, between the portrayed ideal and the reality. This paper situates such narratives, and the lived experiences within critical organisational theory and a neoliberal framework. Utilising autoethnographic accounts of four academics within a higher education context, it highlights this gap and the need to voice concerns about this misalignment. The paper raises awareness of both organisations and workers to the importance of being true to narratives and ensuring they are an accurate representation of what happens. It offers ideas for resisting the disjunction between narrative and reality and a way of challenging neoliberalism within higher education.

In Canada, there is no federal department of education, nor is there a national system of education. Education is the responsibility of provinces and territories, and provincial education ministries lead the organization, implementation, and assessment of education within their jurisdictions. What this means for professional learning is that each province and territory establishes its particular agenda for professional learning based on provincial goals. As a result, Canada has a "mosaic of professional learning experiences, opportunities, promising practices, and challenges" that are differentiated to educators' and students' needs (Campbell et al., 2017, p. 73). Despite these differences, Canadian members of provincial Learning Forward affiliates embrace the sentiments in Standards for Professional Learning. The standards align with members' thinking about high-quality professional learning elements and can use them as guiding principles in the planning of professional supports for teachers and leaders aimed at local needs.

Integral to the global nature play movement, nature play programs have flourished over the last decade, both in Australia and internationally. Internationally, there are two prominent schools of thought in this movement, Danish Nature Kindergartens, and British Forest Schools. The underpinning philosophy of Danish Nature Kindergarten programs has been translated worldwide, raising questions about implementation, and possible decontextualisation, post-translation. Specifically, there are claims that the British translation known as Forest School, has become a marketable commodity and a 'McDonaldised' set of practices that educators have been trained in worldwide, including Australia. In this review article we examine Australian outdoor, nature play programs in early childhood education (ECE) settings to identify the relevance of these claims to Australian ECE contexts. These contexts appear to be diverging from the two international schools of thought, forging a uniquely, Australian 'Nature Play' pathway contextualised to social, cultural, political and educational landscapes. However, we acknowledge the limited Australian nature play program research to date has only been conducted in government regulated ECE settings. In such settings, legislation mandates that early childhood (EC) qualified educators implement programs underpinned by philosophy and pedagogy. Although not infallible, this likely minimises the potential for commodification. Whereas among private-for-profit, outdoor, nature play programs without the same legislated requirements, we argue the potential for commodification may be greater. We identify the need for research to examine the philosophical and pedagogical basis of such private-for-profit programs. As there is no Australian research in these settings, we recommend a research agenda to explore this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critiques the relevance of historical antecedents about children's play in nature and how these historical and political mechanisms create cultural rovoked by Taylor's (2013) exploration of the pervasive influence of romanticised images of innocent children in nature and our own experiences of never-ending "nice" stories about young children in nature, here we trouble how nature experiences may or may not preclude children's meaningful and agentic participation in sustainability. We question is engagement with nature, a tangible and easily accessible approach in early childhood education (ECE) promoting a "nature by default paradigm" and potentially thwarting a fuller transformative engagement with sustainability. Thus, we argue the case for shifting our frames beyond idealised romanticised notions and human-nature dualisms to a "common worlds" (Haraway, 2008; Latour, 2004; Taylor, 2013) frame guided by collectivist understandings within connective life worlds. Such a shift requires a significant recasting of ethical human-nature understandings and relationships in ECE. [Paper presented at the 18th AAEE Biennial Conference--Sustainability, Smart Strategies for the 21st Century.]