Student Teachers’ Workplace-Based Learning in Sweden on Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: Experiences in Practice Settings

Abstract

Workplace-based learning experiences are integral to early childhood teacher education. In Sweden, the objectives of early childhood teacher education programmes require students to develop knowledge and skills about education for sustainability (EfS), in accordance with national policy documents. This includes how to work with EfS in everyday practice. The aim of this qualitative study was to critically analyse how pre-service teachers describe their workplace encounters with EfS, including dilemmas observed in practice and divergences in interpretation of EfS. The empirical data comprised 76 blogs (188 pages of text) written by pre-service teachers as a requirement for a university course report about EfS in early childhood education. A document analysis was employed to critically examine the blogs through a reflexive interpretive process. The findings were revealing of both the students’ meaning-making processes and their workplace supervisors’ understandings of EfS. The findings depict different cultures of ‘doing’ EfS in early childhood settings, reflecting pluralistic and divergent landscapes of understandings as well as an absence of transformative whole-institution approaches in the implementation of EfS.