Browsing by Author "Hultman, Mira"

Sustainable development is wide, abstract and dynamic concept so that’s why it is probably hard to understand or explain. After all in early childhood education sustainable development can be ordinary chores like saving water when washing hands. Because sustainable development is nowadays a popular topic, I wanted to research it in the documents of finnish early childhood education. To limit my subject, I researched values based on sustainable development. The main goal of this research was to find out how values of sustainable development are represented in early childhood education curriculums that are guiding education in day care. Another goal was to compare descriptions of one value between the plans of four cities. My study was qualitative and the material consists of public documents, which are available in the Internet. I choosed to examine early childhood education curriculums of four Capital area cities Espoo, Helsinki, Kauniainen and Vantaa. Documents were produced in between years 2011–2013. Strategy in this study was the content analysis. The research showed that sustainable development and its values are described in different ways in researched documents. On the other hand there could be founded some similarities in these descriptions as well. In some of the early childhood education plans, sustainable development was emphasized but some of them the concept stayed a bit unclear. However this study can explain educators how values based on sustainable development are introduced in the research material but also help to understand the concept in general in early childhood education. This study can help educators to introduce sustainable developmental things in day care and add up what sustainable development means in practice in kindergarten.