Colleen Lockie
Lecturer, Early Childhood Education
“If you believe that you need to be gentle
on the earth, you also need to be gentle
on the people on the earth.”
Education for Sustainability began as an optional course for early childhood students and for the last couple of years has been a compulsory part of the early childhood Bachelor of Teaching and Learning and Diploma programmes. Colleen Lockie has lectured in this course with the course developer Glynne Mackey for the last 2 years.
New Zealand has long been an innovator in early childhood care and there are few adults who, in their childhood, did not see a Plunket nurse, or attend a Kindergarten, Playcentre, or Kohanga Reo. All of these movements were social developments that have become part of our cultural makeup. All require a sense of community, and most have long been incorporating sustainable practices – before the introduction of curb-side recycling, think how many egg cartons and yoghurt pottles were donated to childcare centres to be transformed into art.
Having started her training in ECE at the Christchurch College of Education in 1976, Colleen has seen the early childhood sector move through 30+ years of change. The changing demographic of this country, plus the changing economic global world has required early childhood settings to adapt to meet new community aspirations.
One thing which hasn’t changed is the focus of quality early childhood settings on supporting strong, resilient communities. Hence the Education for Sustainability course – new title but familiar themes.
For the Education for Sustainability course the students are required to hand in two assignments, one about making an impact in one small area of their personal lives and the other about making an impact in early childhood settings. “Our motto behind those two assignments is to ‘start where you are, use what you’ve got, do what you can.’ If you have one hundred plus students every year doing just one small thing in their own lives, the combined effect can have considerable impact over time.” Colleen says that the projects have had a wide-reaching effect: “Quite a few of the students expressed surprise at how enthusiastic their families and friends were, and some of the people they touched will carry it on. In fact, some of their daily lives were transformed.”
Of course, transformation in one small area can be key to understanding the need to become more sustainable in our practices overall. “I think it’s a Pandora’s box and a genie’s bottle,” says Colleen. “You can’t put the lid back down, you can’t put the cork back in. Ignorance is bliss, isn’t it? But once you break through that ignorance then it’s very difficult to go back. Again, I think that the really important thing is to start where you are, use what you’ve got, do what you can – and at certain times and spaces in your life, what you are able to do, however small, is enough.
“If you believe that you need to be gentle on the earth, you also need to be gentle on the people on the earth. We all have our contribution to make. Upsetting people’s sense of wellbeing unnecessarily just doesn’t quite fit with my personal disposition – being an advocate and activist for positive community-based change does.”
With her own children due to leave home in a few years, one area of sustainability that Colleen is particularly interested in is inner city co-housing. “I’ll be left with a big house and a big mortgage. Far too big for me,” she says. Colleen’s idea is to find one or two other people to invest in the property so that they have “a physical and an emotional share in the planning.”
“It just seems obvious to me. I really like the house that I’m in. I’ve got nine fruit trees and a glasshouse and all those things, and I don’t want to give them away. So half the world tells me to put on a sparkly dress and get a rich husband off a cruise ship, and that would solve the problem, but that doesn’t really appeal to me as a solution.” Laughing, she adds, “plus, I haven’t got the right shoes”
In anticipation of attracting potential co-owners, Colleen has had a draughtswoman draw up a few plans for renovations: “We’re looking at making withdrawal spaces. Not to open it up, but to close it down a little, so that there’s something like fourteen withdrawal spaces – some outside, some inside. They’re not necessarily closed off into a little box, just spaces where you can find a wee bit of peace and privacy.”
In a discussion about how nuclear families are increasingly being replaced by blended, extended families again, Colleen tells me about an article that used the term ‘retribalisation’ to describe this reshuffling of community.
“We were never meant to be alone,” she says. “It’s a thing that what we call modern society, or the developed, or western world has forced upon us, and we think it’s always been like that, but it hasn’t. It’s a very short experiment, and it has failed in my view.”
Over time the brunt of this failed experiment has fallen on women with children, and Colleen notes that this has been made worse by the idea that modern women are superwomen who are expected to do everything. “We can have a vocation, career, sport, achievement, whatever, and look gorgeous. And all of those things are wonderful and marvellous, but at the same time, we’re supposed to do them all at the same time, and we’re supposed to do them all really, really well, and it’s getting increasingly harder to ask for help.
“Asking for help is seen as some kind of weakness, or failure, when in fact sixty years ago you would never have thought that you could do it yourself. There were always aunties, uncles, grandparents, or the friend down the road helping, and I think the interesting thing for us now – well it is for me, anyway – is the fascinating way that we’re looking at new ways to rebuild those times. I think as a community we are trying to re-build a tribe, and in a tribe everyone has their area of expertise. Not everyone has to do everything, and it’s reciprocal. The early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, talks about ‘responsive, reciprocal relationships with people, places and things over time’ – an excellent basis for a curriculum or a community.”
One area in which this retribalisation can be updated to fit in with our current work habits is for communities to instigate a ‘time bank’, where one hour of anyone’s time, is worth one hour of someone else’s, no matter what sort of work is carried out. “It doesn’t matter, because in this tribe all skills are equitable,” says Colleen.
In such a community, all members are valued equally, and the innate knowledge of children is considered as important as the wisdom gained from a lifetime of experience. That young children often understand more than we give them credit for is beautifully illustrated with a story about a boy that Colleen met during a student visit:
“It was raining, and the student started singing ‘rain, rain go away’ and this three year old looked at her and said ‘the rain doesn’t have ears.’ And this gorgeous student said ‘you’re absolutely right, so how does the rain know when to turn on and turn off?’ And he thought for a while and said, ‘well I’m not too sure about the turning off, but it turns on when the clouds have drunk too much and have to get rid of some.’ And if you went off and did a PhD on rain, you might find that that’s pretty close to the truth of the matter.
“And what I really love about early childhood is that we can write that up as an engaging story that we can share with the multiple audiences of child, family, staff and any other important people. It becomes our assessment material to support this child’s progress in their thinking.”
“I am privileged to be working in a field that values community, relationships and people, so teaching into Education for Sustainability is like coming home.”
Profile by Sharon McIver