Book-object and sustainable development: perceptions of Early Childhood Education teacher trainees

Abstract

Given the need to find solutions to the current environmental and humanitarian crisis, the idea of sustainable development arises. The education system cannot be oblivious to this, so it will promote critical, ethical and creative thinking that will lead to actions to improve the world. In this sense, the linguistic, visual and material elements of the object-books, as well as their dynamic organisation, offer a suitable framework for dealing with this problematic situation. For this reason, this work aims to find out the perceptions of trainee teachers of Early Childhood Education about object-books in order to use them as a means of enabling environmental education. The lack of specific instruments led to the development of an ad hoc questionnaire to assess the perceptions of 88 future teachers about these artefacts. The results, which were analysed using a descriptive non-experimental method, indicate that the participants have a generally sound knowledge of these eco-literate readings, although they do not precisely identify all the components and potentialities of the object-books. This is therefore an exploratory study that represents a starting point for implementing formative, reflexive, dialogical and proactive practices of a transformative nature based on the object-books that also respond to the demands of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.