The Sustainable Planet Project originated in 1997, the outcome of a staff team-building exercise to encourage home–work linkages. In seeking a shared project, ‘the environment’ emerged as a common interest. Under the Sustainable Planet Project banner, individual staff members were able to add value to their roles as early childhood educators by including personal interests such as gardening, wildlife conservation and recycling. From the start, the project had an action-oriented focus, encapsulated in its subtitle, ‘Saving our planet: Become a conscious part of the solution’. Initially, staff worked with the children on a number of small-scale, mini-projects allied to their own particular environmental interests.

At times, there was high energy. At times, individuals lost interest and momentum. There were periods when little was happening as other projects and priorities took precedence. Nevertheless, despite the ups and downs, all these mini-projects have become inculcated into everyday routines and new projects are continually added. It could be said that the centre now has a ‘sustainability ethic’ where environmentally-friendly thinking and behaviour permeates all aspects of the life of Campus Kindergarten. This ethic supports a view that even young children can be proactive participants in educational and environmental decision making – as initiators, provocateurs, researchers and activists. This is exemplified in the following vignette of a recent sub-project.

The Shopping Trolley Project

This originated when the children discovered a shopping trolley in the playground, raising questions about why and how it got there. Brainstorming came up with these:

Ryan: A burglar dressed up as a normal person got the shopping trolley and took it to Campus Kindy.
Emily: He put it in there in the night and quickly ran away.
Teacher: Well what should we do about it?
John: Ring up.
Hamish: Take it back to the shop.
Fizza: Ring them and let them know.

The children were concerned with both the morality of ‘stealing’ and the impact of dumped trolleys on the local environment. They decided to write a letter to the ‘Coles people’ informing them that their shopping trolley had been found, along with an offer to return the trolley to the store. They also wanted to communicate directly with ‘the burglars’ but, not knowing their addresses, decided to write to the local newspaper in the hope that the perpetrators would read of their concerns.

A responsive local newspaper made this front page news, along with a photostory outlining the children’s ethical and environmental concerns about stolen trolleys. There was also editorial comment entitled ‘Young teach us a worthwhile lesson’, where the editor praised the children for their social responsibility.

This public attention, adding momentum to the children’s interest, led to a supermarket visit. During the car park tour the children identified that existing signage to discourage customers from removing trolleys from the area could only be read if shoppers actually utilised the car parks. The children, however, had already determined that those who ‘borrowed’ the trolleys were not car owners. Consequently, they made new signs targeting the ‘trolley thieves’, which were then posted on the supermarket’s main doors. Coles also changed their policy and now include their signage in other locations.

This vignette illustrates that even very young children can learn to ‘make a difference’ when teachers create an empowering curriculum that promotes social responsibility and active citizenship. Furthermore, through all the activities in the Sustainable Planet Project over the years, there have been a range of tangible environmental outcomes which have considerably reduced the centre’s ‘environmental footprint’. These include:

• enhanced natural play spaces and improved biodiversity;
• reductions in environmentally-harmful kitchen and cleaning products;
• water conservation through installation of a sandpit water barrel, filled only once a day;
• introduction of the ‘litterless lunch’ to minimise packaged foods;
• development of a composting and worm farm system for food scraps; and, overall,
• major reductions in waste from two wheelie bins per day to half a bin per day.

Creating a culture of change

This study illustrates that creating cultural change within an organisation – in this case, a transition to sustainable practices – has been an evolutionary process, advancing incrementally and erratically over almost a decade. Recent organisational change theory (emerging from a branch of chaos theory identified as complexity theory) tells us that this kind of change is typical within a complex organisational system. Change based in complexity does not create order and predictability. Rather, it is more likely to lead to messy, unpredictable, seemingly chaotic conditions. Success precipitates new challenges, new learning, and further change - with instability, rather than stability, being ‘normal’. Profound change in an organisation, therefore, is much more likely to be slowly-emerging cultural change coming from within the organisation, than revolutionary change that sweeps away the old and ushers in the new.

According to Fullan (2003) there are just a small number of factors that help an organisation create significant change within their own complex system. These are evident at Campus Kindergarten.

• Start with your own context-specific moral purpose, ethical dilemma or desirable direction. This should not be imposed from outside.
• Create a collaborative learning culture where teamwork and mentoring become normal social practices.
• Ensure that informed, reflective practice infuses interactions and deliberations. Problems are more communicative obstacles to creativity than issues to be overcome in order to re-establish stability and order.
• Consolidate ‘small wins’ and build on them to scale up their impacts. This is the ‘butterfly effect’ sometimes associated with chaos theory.

Conclusion

This article snapshots how the Campus Kindergarten community has confronted the challenge of sustainability. It has done this by creating a ‘learning organisation’ where a culture of sustainability is continuously recreated by taking advantage of, rather than resisting, the natural power of complexity. This centre is a model of quality early childhood education for sustainability, and an exemplar for us all.

Dr Julie Davis researcher and lecturer in the School of Early Childhood Queensland University of Technology Email: j.davis@qut.edu.au Robert Pratt teacher Campus Kindergarten Brisbane Julie Davis and Robert Pratt spoke at the Early Childhood Australia conference in Brisbane, 28 September – 1 October 2005.

References

Davis, J., Rowntree, N., Gibson, M., Pratt, R., & Eglington, A. (2005). Creating a culture of sustainability: From project to integrated education for sustainability at Campus Kindergarten. In W L. Filho (Ed.), Handbook of sustainability research. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Fullan, M. (2003). Change forces with a vengeance. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

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