A review of research on the Anthropocene in early childhood education

This literature review describes and analyses 19 peer-reviewed scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2020 that focus on the notion of the Anthropocene in early childhood education. The review is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts stemming from environmental history and the sociology of childhood. The results of the analyses are presented under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how these children pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. The review concludes by noting research gaps in the current literature that would benefit from further analysis in future studies in the early childhood education field.


• • How do ECE researchers define the Anthropocene?
• • How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles?
• • What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?
In what follows, I present a brief history of the notion of the Anthropocene in relation to education. Second, I introduce the analytical concepts guiding the analysis. Third, I present the review method. I then attend to the results of the analysis under the themes 'entangled children of the Anthropocene' and 'extraordinary children of the Anthropocene'. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how they pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. Lastly, I present the conclusions of the review, and certain research gaps in the ECE field are addressed.

A brief history of the notion of the Anthropocene in relation to education
The notion of the Anthropocene is often traced back to the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who made the concept famous in the early 2000s. Crutzen (2006) concluded that human activities have grown to the extent that they have become significant geological forces (see also Steffen et al., 2007). After some 120,000 years of the Holocene, it is claimed that we are now in the Anthropocene, an era in which the Earth's surface is imprinted by human activities. The Anthropocene is defined as a geological epoch determined by the effects of the activities of the human species on the Earth's geology and ecosystems, including but not limited to anthropogenic climate change (Waters et al., 2016). Although the causes of specific environmental changes are debated and criticized (e.g. see Malm and Hornborg, 2014;Moore, 2017;Ruddiman, 2018), natural scientists agree that the Earth's climate is changing and that this environmental change will have severe consequences for our everyday lives (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). The Anthropocene is itself claimed to be 'an interruption' from which there is no return (Horn and Bergthaller, 2020). As such, humankind as a geological force contributes to new and emerging questions about the relationship between nature and culture, and the agency and responsibility of the human species for the development and well-being of non-human species on Earth. This development also forces us to rethink the purpose of education (Lysgaard et al., 2019).

Conceptualizations of the nature of children and the nature of education
The review below is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts. These concepts stem from different fields and are used together to address a research problem positioned at the intersection of ECE and the Anthropocene. The first pair of concepts is homo and anthropos, developed by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2015). The second pair is the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child, developed by sociologist of childhood Chris Jenks (2005). This combination of analytical concepts from two distinct disciplines permits investigation, in this article, of the relationship between the categories 'the nature of children' and 'the nature of education'.
First, Chakrabarty (2015) introduced the distinction between homo and anthropos to clarify the different yet mutually existing ways of viewing what the human is in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene does not have moral value in itself, Chakrabarty claims, merely being a scientific category from the geological sciences. Homo refers to the human as a cultural being, differentiated by social identities and categories as other than nature. Anthropos refers to humans as one of many biological species on Earth, albeit one central to the current geological period. In other words, these two terms denote different ways of viewing human agency in relation to the natural world. At the same time, Chakrabarty (2015: 165) points out that homo and anthropos are intertwined, and that the two definitions are 'a pragmatic and artificial distinction through which . . . to capture the two figures of the human that discussions on climate change help us to imagine'. Here, I use the distinction as one of two pairs of analytical concepts to study how ECE researchers define the Anthropocene and what the human is in this epoch. The concepts of anthropos and homo serve as a theoretical foundation for answering the first and second research questions: 'How do ECE researchers define the Anthropocene?' and 'How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles?' Second, Jenks (2005) conceives of two central and mythical images of children and childhood: the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child. Jenks suggests that these images, although incompatible, exist alongside each other in contemporary western societies. The Dionysian child captures the inherently impish child, inclined to harbour evil and related to the Christian belief in Adam's original sin. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories of the psychological life of infants and small children draw on similar understandings of children's nature as originally corrupted. This particular understanding of the child dictates certain behaviours towards children, and includes the imperative for strict rules imposed on children by parents, guardians and teachers. The concept of the Apollonian child, on the other hand, stems from the child in Rousseau's Émile. In Christian terms, this child belongs to humankind before Eve ate the apple. The image of the Apollonian child depicts children as born good and with unique potential. Parents, guardians and teachers are supposed to encourage, facilitate and enable children. There is also a tendency to worship children and childhood for their assumed goodness. Although Jenks (2005: 65) notes that the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child are just images, he stresses that they are nonetheless powerful: 'they live on and give force to the different discourses that we have about children'. At first glance, the Apollonian child is what we encounter in public western discourses on children and childhood. However, Jenks is probably right in claiming that the image of the Dionysian child is lurking somewhere alongside that of the Apollonian child. This observation might be particularly accurate in relation to the Anthropocene, where humankind is perceived as both causing damage and unable to act on planetary forces. Although children are perceived as innocent and close to nature (Jenks, 2005), the parenting and guardian styles needed to guide children in life within the Anthropocene might differ from the imperative of encouragement and facilitation. I use the distinction between the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child as a conceptual pair to study how ECE researchers make sense of education in relation to children in the Anthropocene. These two concepts provide a theoretical foundation for answering the third research question: 'What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?'

Review method
I searched for articles for the present review in May and June 2020. The purpose was to find peerreviewed scholarly articles on the subject of the Anthropocene in the field of ECE. Books, book chapters, book reviews and editorials were excluded from this review. First, I used the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, were I applied the keywords 'Anthropocene AND early childhood'. This search resulted in seven hits. Second, I used the Libsearch database, which enabled me to search, simultaneously, almost everything in the databases of my university library, including books, journal articles and e-books. I conditioned the search by requesting only peerreviewed articles and using the keywords 'Anthropocene AND early childhood education'. This resulted in 20 hits, some of which were duplicates. I also conducted a search for 'Anthropocene AND early childhood', which resulted in 24 hits, some of which were duplicates. Through this method, I found one additional article that did not appear in the previous searches. Using similar keywords, I found one additional article when searching for articles using the search engine Google Scholar. For reliability, I repeated the same searches in June 2020, when I found two additional articles. Shortly afterwards, in June 2020, the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education published a special issue on 'Childhood studies and the Anthropocene', containing six peer-reviewed articles. In all, I found and read 24 unique articles. Five of these were removed from the present review: one of these five turned out to be a book review and the remaining four focused either on education or childhood in relation to the Anthropocene, but not the two in combination. The selected articles were all published between 2015 and 2020. In all, I present and analyse 19 unique articles in the review below. These articles were found in the journals listed in Table 1. I first read through and categorized all of the articles based on the keywords and theoretical perspectives and methods used. Second, I categorized and analysed all of the articles, first, by posing the three research questions to the articles and, second, by applying the four analytical concepts to selected excerpts relating to the respective research questions. The analysis resulted in two main analytical findings, which are presented below under the themes 'entangled children of the Anthropocene' and 'extraordinary children of the Anthropocene'.

Entangled children of the Anthropocene
How do researchers in ECE define the Anthropocene? The reviewed articles typically draw on definitions of the Anthropocene that are very closely tied to the scientific discourse on the epoch. For example, Ritchie (2015: 41) writes that the Anthropocene era is one 'where human induced climate changes are disrupting the planet's systems, threatening the survival of not only humans, but of eco-systems and the earth's biodiversity', while Nxumalo (2017: 559) writes that the Anthropocene is 'the current epoch of humans as fossil-fuelled planetary force'. Since 2018, other more critical concepts have emerged as well, such as Haraway's (2015) 'Chthulucene' (e.g. see Duhn and Galvez, 2020: 731;Murris et al., 2018: 29), the 'racial Capitalocene' (Nxumalo and ross, 2019) and the 'Capitalocene' (Duhn and Galvez, 2020: 731). Taylor (2020: 342) specifically cites the feminist critique of 'the capital A "Anthropos" (Greek for capital M Man) of the Anthropocene nomenclature as a problematic phallogocentric signifier that risks perpetuating a particularly dangerous form of human-centric conceit'. These alternative concepts are suggested to emphasize a critique of the universal human. It is evident that the notion of the Anthropocene has emerged and engaged ECE scholars over the past five years. However, there seems to be some recent hesitation around the notion of the Anthropocene from feminist and anticolonial perspectives. Whether the concept of the Anthropocene will prevail or be replaced by something else in ECE is an open question at this point.
However, one reviewed article explicitly applies a different understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene compared with the other articles. Here, the unequal relations between black and white people and the 'antiblackness in schooling' (Nxumalo and ross, 2019: 502) are taken as the point of departure for an analysis of children's relationships with the environment. The authors join in with a critique of 'the term Anthropocene and its mobilizations, particularly in relation to the reinforcement of universalist discourses that ignore the originary and ongoing injustices of the Anthropocene' (Nxumalo and ross, 2019: 506). Nxumalo and ross (2019: 505) claim that 'an underlying hierarchical view of Black and other economically marginalized urban children versus other children with presumably "normal" relations to nature' is left unproblematized. Rather than focusing on collapsing and questioning the dualism between nature and culture, the authors focus on critiquing the reproduction of racial inequalities. Although indigenous knowledges are hailed in several of the articles (e.g. Ritchie, 2015;Taylor, 2017), Nxumalo and ross (2019) are the only ones taking as their point of departure the problematization of unequal relations between humans. Chakrabarty's (2015) notion of homo refers to the human as a cultural being, differentiated by social identities and categories and considered 'other' relative to nature. It could be argued that Nxumalo and ross (2019) introduce the differentiated human into the ECE literature on the Anthropocene. Although it is understandable that considerable attention is paid to the interconnectedness of nature and culture, there are also reasons for critically questioning what is overlooked when children (plural) are constructed as anthropos and entangled with nature . Wolff et al. (2020: 14) have explicitly claimed that posthumanism is an approach that raises some as-yet-unresolved problems in relation to ECE, noting that it 'seems difficult to take care of and educate small children if they are not allowed to have a centric position'. Apart from the possible problem of decentring children in institutions where they arguably should have an important voice, there indeed seem to be reasons for critically questioning what is overlooked when power differences between humans are left out. Human ecologist Andreas Malm (2019: 156) has argued from a critical Marxist position for the importance of sifting 'out the social components from the natural, if we wish to understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them'. A central question for Malm is what we can see and change if we focus solely on questioning and transgressing boundaries. What we miss when the sole focus is on entanglements and enmeshments is a question worthy of further critical attention, also within ECE.
As shown above, efforts have been made in the literature to rethink conventional understandings of the relations between children and nature. In the scholarly literature so far, considerable attention has been paid to commenting on and criticizing earlier conceptualizations of the separation between children and nature. However, other critical perspectives that take into account the inequalities between humans have been largely absent. In very recent years, however, other critical concepts, such as the 'Chthulucene' and 'Capitalocene', have made their way into studies of ECE on the Anthropocene. The above analysis points to the importance of not forgetting that the anthropos consists of homo -that is, differentiated human beings with very different access to resources and power. In the words of Lindgren and Öhrfelt (2019: 301), there is a risk of 'the posthumanist discourse . . . articulat[ing] the child as "orphan", paradoxically detaching the child from its subjectivity and social and historical past'.

Extraordinary children of the Anthropocene
What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles? Most of the reviewed articles call for teaching children to learn better with/in relation to nature. Human exceptionalism is recognized and problematized in previous and contemporary attempts at and practices of environmental education (Nxumalo, 2018;e.g. see Taylor, 2017). Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw write: We want young children to sense and register, in more than cognitive ways, that it is never just about 'us'. And we also want to stay open to the possibility that other species and life forms shape us in ways that exceed our ability to fully comprehend. (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015: 512) The way in which education is prompted recalls the assumption that young children must be taught a caring sensibility towards life forms other than humans. Encounters with a 'multiplicity of different worlds' is assumed to foster 'agency, care and empathy' (Wals, 2017: 162). This conceptualization of the child recalls Jenks' (2005) notion of the Dionysian child, the originally sinful human who needs close monitoring and training to become good. The virtue of caring for the non-human world does seem to emerge through a certain kind of education.
Against the need to intervene through education stands another, opposing, conceptualization of children in many of the review articles: extraordinary children. Children understood in this way seem to have the potential to offer adults insights into 'alternative ways of becoming with matter' (Merewether, 2019: 106) and to possess extraordinary qualities: 'children are already practicing this form of collective thinking and looking beyond the human/nature divide to cross its boundary set by adults' (Jiang, 2018: 5).
Moreover, Taylor (2020: 345) writes: 'It is precisely because pre-school aged children are less likely to have learned the "rules" of the "Man vs Nature" game (as Le Guin puts it) that I find their relations with wildlife so illuminating'. Children inhabit something extraordinary, which adults rarely have access to. In the words of Merewether (2019: 106): 'young children's nuanced and sensitive listening to their multispecies surroundings has potential to alert the humanist-trained adults'. These and similar descriptions of the nature of children in the Anthropocene recall Jenks' image of the Apollonian child, depicted as born good and possessing unique potential. The role of teachers of the Apollonian child is to encourage, facilitate and enable the child's unique and beautiful capacities. Here we also see a tendency to worship children.
Contrary to the understanding of children emerging in some of the reviewed articles, adults are typically constructed as Dionysian characters of ignorance and blindness: adults' habitual ways of seeing may preclude us from being attentive to the agentic capacity of the material. Rather than dismissing, ignoring or trying to reshape them, adults can join with and learn from young children's everyday multispecies kin-making with bodies such as puddles. (Merewether, 2019: 114) It seems inevitable that the appropriate subject of the Anthropocene is the child. As Taylor writes: It is a low-key, ordinary, everyday kind of response that values and trusts the generative and recuperative powers of small and seemingly insignificant worldly relations infinitely more than it does the heroic tropes of human rescue and salvation narratives. These are the kinds of non-divisive relations that many young children already have with the world. They are full of small achievements. We can learn with them. (Taylor, 2017(Taylor, : 1458(Taylor, -1459 In the above quotation, Taylor specifically mentions 'non-divisive relations' as something that children, rather than adults, have access to. The knowledge needed in the Anthropocene is, it seems, the knowledge that unspoiled children already have. Nxumalo (2017: 566) writes that pedagogies in the Anthropocene should build on 'perspectives that children are often already embodying and contemplating'. In one way, children might be considered more suitable and knowledgeable than adults for a life in the Anthropocene. According to Wals (2017: 158), children lose this status as they grow older: 'children's innate capacities to care, show empathy, explore, sense and create . . . are capacities that they tragically seem to lose as they grow older and spend more time in schools'.
The reviewed articles generally express critical opinions regarding mainstream educational ideas and institutions; this applies both to articles depicting children as Dionysian and to those depicting them as Apollonian. In the case of Apollonian children, however, it seems reasonable to believe that children in the Anthropocene might almost do better without what they learn through education. The construction of the extraordinary child seems to depict the educated adult as corrupted, while not-yet-educated children are seen as those holding the knowledge we need in order to exist in the Anthropocene. A further conceptualization of what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene seems to be needed in order to take the discussion further and develop the field of ECE.

Concluding discussion
This review article has sought to describe and analyse peer-reviewed articles on the subject of ECE in the Anthropocene. I asked the following research questions: • • How do researchers in ECE define the Anthropocene?
• • How is the relationship between children and nature described in the articles?
• • What ideas about the purpose of education are proposed in the articles?
In the reviewed research, the scientific notion of the Anthropocene is often taken at face value and as the point of departure in most studies, though a few studies since 2018 engage with alternative notions such as the 'Chthulucene' and 'Capitalocene'. It is evident that the notion of the Anthropocene has emerged and engaged ECE scholars during the past five years. However, I also noted some recent hesitation in using the notion of the Anthropocene, with critique coming from feminist and anticolonial perspectives.
The reviewed research shows that the figure of the entangled child is largely based on an understanding of the child as anthropos -that is, seen as one of many biological species on Earth. Thus, the relationship between nature and the child is most commonly described as entangled. I found that a few studies draw on the notion of homo, instead making the unequal relations between humans the object of study. Here, I identified a visible research gap that merits further attention. Furthermore, the reviewed research shows that the figure of the extraordinary child draws on the images of both the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child.
Concerning the ideas about the purpose of education proposed through the reviewed articles, I found that there seems to be a tendency in the literature to romanticize children as essentially different from adults. This construction depicts the educated adult as corrupted, while not-yet-educated children become those holding the proper knowledge our species needs in order to exist in the Anthropocene. It is worth contemplating what this romantic picture brings about for children in education. Does it create a sense of responsibility for what adults have been unable to complete and comprehend, as suggested in Ideland's (2019) critical study of the 'eco-certified child'? It seems as though, for the past five years, researchers interested in environmental concerns in ECE have been following Somerville and Williams' (2015: 102) advice that 'it is recommended that new post-human frameworks recently applied in early childhood education research could usefully be connected to researching early childhood education for planetary sustainability'. What we miss when the sole focus is on the entanglements and enmeshments central to the posthuman framework is a question that is worthy of further critical attention, also within ECE.
This review shows that it is worth critically investigating the ideas produced and circulated by scientific research, and contemplating what is overlooked when many researchers focus on similar research problems and theoretical points of departure. The notion of the Anthropocene has emerged from the geological sciences and made its way into the field of education and ECE. Although a lot of important work has been conducted so far, the field of ECE would benefit from multiple perspectives and from multiple methods for investigating what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.