Why Place-Connected Learning Is the Missing Link in Early Childhood Sustainability Education

Why Place-Connected Learning Is the Missing Link in Early Childhood Sustainability Education

“Is the ocean under the sandpit?”

The question came during a World Ocean Day activity at a regional early childhood service. The children had been making jellyfish from recycled materials and singing songs about coral reefs. But when that question surfaced—from a child who had never seen the sea—it gave the educator pause.

They realised something essential:

In trying to teach sustainability, they had accidentally taught that nature lives somewhere else.

Far away. Out there. In books and posters and problems too big for little hands to touch.

🌿 Reconnecting Sustainability to Place

In early childhood education and care, sustainability is not just a principle to tick off. It’s a living, breathing part of our curriculum. But for many young children, sustainability can feel abstract—like something that happens somewhere else, or something meant for grown-ups.

That’s where place-connected learning becomes powerful.

When we begin with the environments and systems that children already know—both natural and built—we ground global issues in familiar, everyday experiences.

Place isn’t just bushland or a garden bed. It’s the street out front. The stormwater drain near the gate. The corner shop. The community mural. The library. The people, languages, stories, and systems that shape our everyday lives.

By widening our understanding of place, we create new pathways for children to see sustainability as something real, relevant, and relational.

🔍 Place-Based Collaborative Intelligence

When we move from teaching about sustainability to learning with our place, we unlock a different kind of intelligence.

Children and educators become co-investigators, exploring their surroundings together:

• Why are the magpies swooping this week?
• Where does the rain go after it hits our roof?
• What happens to the recycling after the truck takes it?
• Who built the footpath—and why does it curve that way?
• What do the symbols on the community hall mean?
  
  

This kind of inquiry builds what we call place-based collaborative intelligence—the shared capacity of children, educators, families, and communities to notice, care for, and respond to their unique place.

It’s not just about knowledge. It’s about relationship—with land, people, systems, and stories.

🌏 From Local Action to Global Understanding

Young children don’t need to understand the full scale of ocean acidification or carbon emissions. But they can understand that what goes down their drain ends up in the creek. That bees🐝 help our fruit grow. That sharing food or planting herbs connects them to people they’ve never met.

Through hands-on, place-connected projects, children begin to see themselves as contributors to their community—not someday, but right now.

• Picking up rubbish in the park becomes a conversation about animal habitats.
  
• Mapping safe walking routes to the library becomes a study of sustainable transport.
  
• Visiting a local green grocer turns into a lesson on food systems and local economies.
  
• Translating a welcome sign into home languages opens the door to cultural identity and inclusion.
  
• Planting a tree becomes a long-term gift to future children at the service.
  

 These are small actions. But their impact ripples outward—nurturing a sense of agency, connection, and care that stretches into homes, communities, and futures.

🤝 Strengthening Relationships With Families and Community

When children are learning from the streets, shops, drains, footpaths, and gardens that families walk past every day—sustainability becomes visible. Familiar. Shareable.

Children come home asking questions. Telling stories. Noticing things. Inviting their families into the learning.

Suddenly, sustainability isn’t something educators are doing to or for children—it’s something the whole learning community is doing with them.

This kind of place-connected practice strengthens:

• Family partnerships built on shared noticing and shared values
  
• A sense of belonging and cultural identity within the community
  
• Resilience through local action, collective empowerment, and connection
  
  

✨ From 'Extra' to Essential

Place-connected sustainability isn’t an add-on. It’s not something we squeeze in between more important topics. It’s a mindset—and it changes everything.

It reminds us that powerful, relevant learning doesn’t require special resources or exotic themes.

It starts with what we already have:
The puddles. The pavements. The mural. The storm drain. The seasonal changes. The shopfronts. The fences. The parks. The community centre. The waterways. The shared language. The people who walk this place with us.

And when children feel connected to their place—its stories, systems, people, and patterns—they begin to understand their place in the world.

Not as passive recipients of information, but as capable contributors to a more sustainable, inclusive, and thriving future.

🌱 Ready to explore the sustainability stories hiding in plain sight at your service?

Download our free guide - Starting With Place: A Guide for Everyday Sustainability in Early Childhood to help you and your team notice, celebrate, and build on the place-based learning already happening around you.

Or connect with us on LinkedIn at the Project Sustainability Collective—where we share reflections, tools, and ideas to support your sustainability journey.

Let’s reimagine what place can mean—and what’s possible when we learn with it.