Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: An Assessment of the ERS-SDEC Scale (OMEP) in a Comparative Study of Chile-Venezuela

The Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) program is ever-increasingly being promoted in the field of early childhood education. This proposal is articulated with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and UNESCO's Education 2030 Agenda, which understands that children may learn and develop competencies on sustainability, be agents of change, and actively contribute to sustainable development. In this regard, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education has insisted on conceptualizing Education for Sustainable Development from the standpoint of three dimensions: sociocultural, economic, and environmental, with multiple efforts to build indicators that allow one to value the educational environment as a promoter of ECEfS, reflected in the Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood (Siraj-Blacthford, J., Mogharreban, C. & Park, E. (2016). International research on education for sustainable development in early childhood. Springer, Berlin. Doi:10.1007/978-3-319-422008-4). We, therefore, questioned ourselves regarding its relevance for assessing these types of initiatives to validate the indicators encountered in two Latin American countries. A comparative case study was considered the most appropriate method of analysis from the perspective of an international comparison (García-Garrido, Educación Comparada. Fundamentos y problemas, Dykinson, Madrid, García-Garrido, Educación Comparada. Fundamentos y problemas, Dykinson, 1982), taking into consideration two units of analysis (kindergartens selected in Santiago, Chile, and Caracas, Venezuela). The most relevant results showed that there were no significant differences between the two countries. The analysis yielded scores that placed the work of the kindergartens mostly at level 1 in the economic and sociocultural dimensions, and an incipient level 3 in the environmental dimension, which seems to indicate a transition toward greater sustainability in pedagogical work with children.