Why and How This Podcast is Evolving: A Transition Episode (Ep 37)

"Why This Podcast is Evolving: A Transition Episode"

After 36 episodes exploring the breadth of early childhood education, 'For Your Ears from the Early Years' is evolving into the Project Sustainability Collective Podcast.

This bridging episode explains why.

Between July 2024 and December 2025, I hosted conversations with thought leaders about brain development, creativity, leadership, pedagogical courage, play, and place. Over 2,500 downloads across 55 countries. All grown organically through educators sharing with educators.

But when I look back across these conversations, I see something I couldn't see while living it: there was a thread running through nearly every episode. Sustainability was there all along—I just hadn't named it yet.

Episode 9 was the turning point. Bronwyn Cron shared a story about children who discovered a frog living in a gumnut they'd collected from bush kinder. In that moment, a light went on in my brain, and it changed the direction of my work.

In this episode, I share:

• The sustainability thread woven through all 36 conversations
• Why everything I know about early childhood pedagogy IS sustainability education
• The paradigm shift: sustainability isn't an add-on—it's an integration lens
• What Bronwyn and I discovered through our 2025 Sustainability Snapshot research
• Why we're moving beyond sustainability itself to regenerative futures
• What comes next with the Project Sustainability Collective Podcast

All 36 original episodes remain available. Every conversation is still valuable. But this is where the work focuses now.

Thank you for these 36 episodes together. I hope you'll join us for what comes next.

Every conversation mattered. Every guest contributed to this evolution.

Listen to all episodes: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2071197

#EarlyChildhoodEducation #Sustainability #ECEC #EarlyYears #PlayBasedLearning #EducationForSustainability #ReggiоEmilia #ProfessionalDevelopment #EducationalLeadership #EYLF #SustainabilityEducation #EarlyChildhood #ProjectSustainabilityCollective

Every conversation mattered. Every guest contributed to this evolution.

Listen to all episodes: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2071197.

Transcript

PART ONE: THE ANNOUNCEMENT

LILI-ANN:

Welcome to a space where early years education comes alive. I'm Lili-Ann, and this is For Your Ears from the Early Years.

Today's episode is different. Not an interview, but a conversation with you - about journeys, about deepening, and about what happens when 35 conversations plant seeds you didn't realize were taking root.

When I launched this podcast, I wanted to create space for the leading voices in early childhood education. I wanted conversations that honoured intellectual rigour, that went beneath the surface, that treated educators as the thoughtful professionals you are.

And over 35 episodes, that's exactly what happened.

Thirty-five conversations. Over 2,500 downloads. Fifty-five countries and territories. Three hundred thirty-one cities. All grown organically, one conversation at a time.

From the very first episode with Sarah-Louise Gandolfo Nelson, we explored what sustains educators in this work - relationships, courage, mentorship, the values that keep us going. We talked about brain architecture and metacognition, thinking about how children learn to learn. We wandered through creativity and materiality, discovering that when children work with natural materials, they're not just creating - they're forming identity, understanding their relationship to place. We opened up thinking about the arts not as add-ons, but as fundamental languages children use to make meaning.

We talked about leadership, about pedagogical courage, about creating culture. About children's rights and belonging. About language connected to land - that beautiful Welsh word Cynefin, meaning profound belonging to place. And in the final episode, Debi Keyte-Hartland shared Robin Wall Kimmerer's profound wisdom that would become central to everything that followed.

And Episode Nine. Episode Nine featured Bronwyn Cron on authentic sustainability in early childhood education.

I didn't know it then, but that conversation changed everything.

When I look back across these 35 conversations now, I see something I couldn't see while I was in them. There was a thread running through nearly every interview. Not always named explicitly, but present.

Place-based learning. Connection to the natural world. Children as capable citizens of the now, not the future. Relationships - not just between humans, but between children and the living world. Language rooted in land. Materials from nature. The arts emerging from embodied, sensory experience.

The wisdom that "all flourishing is mutual" - that children, educators, families, community, and the more-than-human world thrive together, or not at all.

Sustainability was there all along. I just hadn't named it yet.

PART TWO: THE DEEPENING

LILI-ANN:

After that Episode Nine conversation, Bronwyn and I met at the Warren Glen nursery. It's this beautiful place, surrounded by native plants, and we sat together for hours. I was asking questions, trying to understand how sustainability education actually worked in practice. I could grasp the environmental piece intellectually, but I couldn't quite see the whole picture.

And then Bronwyn told me a story.

She'd been working with an early childhood service that did bush kinder excursions. The children had been out in nature, and they'd brought materials back to their classroom - gumnuts, eucalyptus leaves, interesting bark, all these beautiful loose parts. They were arranging them on a table, completely absorbed in this curation process.

And suddenly, a frog hopped out of one of the gum nuts.

The children froze. And then, slowly, the realisation spread through the group. They hadn't just collected materials. They'd removed a frog from its home. They'd disrupted an entire small ecosystem.

In that moment, their identity shifted. They weren't gatherers anymore. They were stewards. Responsible. Connected. Part of something larger than themselves.

That story lit up my brain.

Because suddenly I understood. This wasn't about teaching children to recycle. This wasn't about adding environmental topics to an already crowded curriculum. This was about children developing their relationship with the living world during the same critical window when their brains are forming, when their capacity for empathy is emerging, when they're learning who they are in relation to others.

And then Bronwyn said four words that changed the trajectory of my work: "I have lots of stories."

We got so excited. We sat there at Warren Glen and planned out our entire collaboration on the back of a napkin. Because everyone wants to plan something on the back of a napkin, right?

But I was still stuck on something. How did my expertise connect to this work? I'm not an environmental scientist. I'm a specialist in early childhood pedagogy, in inquiry learning, in play-based approaches, in how children's brains develop, in thinking skills and intellectual rigor and the role of the educator as catalyst.

And then the revelation: All of that IS sustainability education.

Every single thing I know about how children learn, about extending thinking, about creating culture, about supporting project-based exploration, about honouring children's unique theories and ideas - all of it applies directly to education for sustainability. Because you cannot build environmental stewardship without secure attachment, emotional regulation, empathy, problem-solving, and systems thinking. These aren't separate trajectories. They're the same process, viewed through different lenses.

The first 2,000 days of life - the period when brain architecture forms, when over a million neural connections per second are being made - that's also the critical window for developing nature connection. Research shows that if children don't develop respect for nature during their early years, they're at risk of never developing such attitudes. Childhood experiences with nature predict adult environmental values and actions more powerfully than later environmental education.

The same window. The same developmental processes. The same work.

Sustainability isn't something we add to early childhood education. It's a lens for seeing what we're already doing - and for doing it more intentionally, with greater clarity about what's at stake.

PART THREE: THE WORK AHEAD

LILI-ANN:

So Bronwyn and I have spent the past year building something together. Not just ideas on the back of a napkin anymore, but organised frameworks, research tools, structured approaches. We call it the Sustainability Impact Accelerator.

We conducted a Sustainability Snapshot in 2025 - conversations and surveys with over 200 early childhood services across Australia. We worked directly with educator teams, listened to their questions, their struggles, and their brilliance.

And here's what we learned: Educators are already doing so much that supports children's connection to place, to nature, to sustainability thinking. But 87.5% of services report minimal impact from the EYLF 2.0 Sustainability Principle since its introduction in February 2024. Not because they're not capable. Not because they don't care. But because they need support to consolidate their knowledge, to use a sustainability lens to recognise what they're already doing, and to work more intentionally with that lens.

They need what you've always needed: intellectual rigour. Not surface-level compliance activities. Deep thinking. Frameworks that honour your expertise. Respect for your professional judgment.

And here's the shift in thinking that changes everything: Sustainability isn't an add-on to early childhood education. It's not another thing to fit into an already full day, another box to tick, another theme to rotate through.

Sustainability is an overarching paradigm - an integration lens that includes and connects the approaches and methodologies we already know work beautifully in early childhood. Play-based learning. Inquiry approaches. Reggio-inspired practice. Emergent curriculum. Place-based education. These aren't separate from sustainability. They're how we DO sustainability education in the early years.

When we understand this, we stop asking "How do I add sustainability?" and start asking "How do I recognise the sustainability thinking already happening in my service and work with it more intentionally?"

And there's something even bigger at stake here. We're living at a moment on this planet where we need to think beyond sustainability itself - beyond just maintaining what we have - to how we can actively regenerate. New agricultural methods. Revolutionary approaches to energy. Reforestation at scale. Transformed understanding of ocean health and its role.

These are enormous, planetary-scale ideas. And yes, they matter for early childhood education. Because the early years are where we start. The children in our services right now - they're the ones who'll need the cognitive flexibility, the systems thinking, the emotional capacity, the deep nature connection to engage with regenerative futures.

All education matters when we're creating a preferred future. And early childhood education matters profoundly.

This isn't pressure. This is the purpose. And the opportunity

This matters more now than ever. We're living in a time when strong, courageous voices are needed. When the more-than-human world needs fierce advocates. When the choices we make in early childhood settings are quite literally shaping whether children develop the capacity to care about planetary futures.

This isn't hyperbole. This is what the research tells us.

And this is the work Bronwyn and I are doing together now.

PART FOUR: THE EVOLUTION

LILI-ANN:

Which brings me to why we're here today, having this conversation.

I love this podcast. I'm proud of these 35 episodes and the incredible thinkers who've shared their wisdom here. Every single conversation has shaped my thinking, expanded my understanding, and reminded me why this work matters.

But I've reached a point where I need to focus. Where the thread that's been running through these conversations needs to become the central narrative.

So, For Your Ears from the Early Years is evolving.

The new podcast is called the Project Sustainability Collective Podcast. And it's where Bronwyn and I will be creating content specifically for early childhood educators and leaders who want to embed sustainability meaningfully into their practice.

We'll bring the same intellectual depth you've come to expect. The same respect for your professionalism. The same commitment to going beneath the surface. But with a focused lens on sustainability as the integration framework for early childhood education and care.

This isn't about abandoning the themes we've explored together. Play. Thinking skills. Relationships. Children's unique identities and theories. The role of leadership in creating culture. Connection and interdependence. All of that remains absolutely central.

We're just naming the lens we've been looking through all along.

I want to thank every single guest who's been part of this journey. Your generosity, your wisdom, your willingness to think publicly about complex ideas - you've created something remarkable. In the show notes for this episode, I'll list all 35 conversations with links, because each one deserves to be revisited, to continue sparking thinking.

And I want to thank you, the listeners. You've shown up from 55 countries, downloaded these conversations over 2,500 times, and sent messages about insights gained and practices shifted. You've reminded me that there's hunger for substantive, thoughtful content that treats educators as the intellectually capable professionals you are.

That doesn't change. That's coming with us.

CLOSING

LILI-ANN:

The Project Sustainability Collective Podcast launches soon. You'll find it wherever you currently listen to podcasts. Bronwyn and I will be there, bringing you research-informed, practically grounded conversations about sustainability in early childhood.

We've already recorded a series on the first 2,000 days - exploring why child development and sustainability are one story, not two. We've created a five-part podclass series unpacking the EYLF Sustainability Principle for Australian educators, with insights relevant to early childhood practice globally.

And we'll keep creating content that supports your agency and the children's agency as you work together in partnership. Because that's what this is about: supporting educators and children as co-researchers, as thinkers, as stewards of the living world.

This work requires culture, place, time, commitment, sparkle, and respect. The same values that have guided everything I've created, everything I believe about early childhood education.

As Jane Goodall reminds us: "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."

Early childhood educators, you're making that difference during the most powerful window that exists. The first 2,000 days when children's brains are forming, when their capacity for connection is emerging, when their relationship with the living world is taking shape.

You're not just teaching. You're shaping futures. Plural. Human futures and planetary futures are inseparably intertwined.

That's the work worth focusing on. That's the work Bronwyn and I are committed to supporting.

Thank you for these 35 episodes together. Thank you for listening with open minds and generous hearts.

And I hope you'll join us for what comes next.

This is Lili-Ann Kriegler, and this has been For Your Ears from the Early Years.