Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 Goals and Early Childhood Education—A Case Study of Project-Based Learning in Higher Education

Sustainable development is integrated into the Finnish education system at all levels of education from early childhood to higher education. Early childhood educators’ study for a bachelor’s degree in higher education in Finland. The studies comprise many subjects, such as learning and teaching literacy and numeracy, but also developing, for instance, motor skills or creativity through arts and crafts. Craft studies are a five-credit course of the bachelor’s degree. In this case study, future early childhood teachers were given a project-based learning task to incorporate the Agenda 2030 goals into their craft project, and to contextualize it to early childhood learning situations. We are interested in gaining knowledge about how to concretise learning the Agenda 2030 goals through crafts in early childhood education. The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse how early childhood teacher students concretize the Agenda 2030 Goals through crafts in a project-based learning task and what they learn during the process. We view through their learning portfolios how the students reflect learning through play and their interaction with materials and crafting methods, in order to understand their connection to their surroundings, while at the same time, developing their senses, motor skills, creativity, and thinking skills.