IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v11y2019i15p4212-d254674.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Young Children’s Contributions to Sustainability: The Influence of Nature Play on Curiosity, Executive Function Skills, Creative Thinking, and Resilience

Author

Listed:
  • Julie Ernst

    (Applied Human Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN 55812, USA)

  • Firdevs Burcak

    (Hasan Ali Yucel Faculty of Education, Department of Early Childhood Education, Istanbul University - Cerrahpasa, 34500 Istanbul, Turkey)

Abstract

Environmental education for young children has great potential for fostering the skills, values, and dispositions that support sustainability. While North American guidelines emphasize the importance of using the natural world for open-ended exploration, discovery, and play, this approach has been criticized for lacking the transformative power necessary for meaningfully contributing to sustainability issues. Four pilot studies were conducted exploring the influence of nature play in the context of nature preschools on children’s curiosity, executive function skills, creative thinking, and resilience. These studies used established quantitative instruments to measure growth in these constructs among nature preschool participants, comparing this growth with participants in high quality, play-based, non-nature preschools. The results suggest a positive contribution of nature play, with greater levels of curiosity, creative thinking, and resilience than what was observed in the non-nature preschool participants, and executive function skills similar to the non-nature preschool participants and exceeding national norms. Collectively, these pilot studies suggest the potential contribution of nature play in the context of education for sustainability.

Suggested Citation

  • Julie Ernst & Firdevs Burcak, 2019. "Young Children’s Contributions to Sustainability: The Influence of Nature Play on Curiosity, Executive Function Skills, Creative Thinking, and Resilience," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(15), pages 1-22, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:15:p:4212-:d:254674
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4212/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4212/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Julie Ernst & Kerri McAllister & Pirkko Siklander & Rune Storli, 2021. "Contributions to Sustainability through Young Children’s Nature Play: A Systematic Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(13), pages 1-36, July.
    2. Serap Sevimli-Celik & Begum Canaslan-Akyar, 2024. "Pre-schoolers in nature: A five-week play & learning experience within a Turkish context," Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Springer;Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 14(1), pages 87-101, March.
    3. Thomas Beery, 2020. "Exploring Access to Nature Play in Urban Parks: Resilience, Sustainability, and Early Childhood," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(12), pages 1-18, June.
    4. Claudia Melis & Per-Arvid Wold & Kathrine Bjørgen & Børge Moe, 2020. "Norwegian Kindergarten Children’s Knowledge about the Environmental Component of Sustainable Development," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(19), pages 1-16, September.
    5. Thomas Beery & Ola Magntorn, 2021. "Pre-Service Early Childhood Educator Experience in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-20, April.
    6. Sixian Li & Qianyi Jiang & Chenyu Deng, 2022. "The Development and Validation of an Outdoor Free Play Scale for Preschool Children," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(1), pages 1-18, December.
    7. Avril Johnstone & Anne Martin & Rita Cordovil & Ingunn Fjørtoft & Susanna Iivonen & Boris Jidovtseff & Frederico Lopes & John J. Reilly & Hilary Thomson & Valerie Wells & Paul McCrorie, 2022. "Nature-Based Early Childhood Education and Children’s Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(10), pages 1-30, May.
    8. Miriam Romero-López & M. Carmen Pichardo & Judit Bembibre-Serrano & Trinidad García-Berbén, 2020. "Promoting Social Competence in Preschool with an Executive Functions Program Conducted by Teachers," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(11), pages 1-17, May.
    9. Johan Colding & Matteo Giusti & Andreas Haga & Marita Wallhagen & Stephan Barthel, 2020. "Enabling Relationships with Nature in Cities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(11), pages 1-16, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:15:p:4212-:d:254674. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.