Conference Program

The relationship between children and the natural environment represents one of the most generative terrains for early childhood education, yet sustainability is still too often approached as a declarative value rather than a lived experience. This contribution proposes Land Art as a pedagogical language capable of fostering the understanding of sustainable ways of living from an experiential and place-based perspective, with particular attention to early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts. The theoretical framework draws on embodied and situated learning (Rivoltella, 2013), grounding the proposal in the conviction that values such as sustainability can only be genuinely understood and shared through direct, immersive engagement with the environment. This perspective recalls the experiential approach of Patrick Geddes — Scottish biologist, sociologist and pioneer of regional and urban planning — whose expression "Vivendo discimus — by living we learn" (Kitchen, 1975) anticipates many of the principles that today inform place-based education and active citizenship pedagogy. Land Art is mobilised here not merely as an artistic reference but as a transdisciplinary and transversal practice. Originating in the 1960s in parallel with the rise of environmental awareness, it develops art within and through the environment, reclaiming and re-signifying space through collective and inclusive processes of environmental care. This bottom-up dimension opens educational processes to dynamic and overlapping relationships between learners, environment, and community, linking pedagogical experience to democratic engagement with place. The acquisition of an observational and exploratory gaze (central to Land Art practice) aims to reconstruct children's sense of place belonging in terms of civitas, and to unclose that genius loci (Brusa Pasquè, 2020) that is necessary to shape more open, participatory, and sustainable educational practices. The foundational principles of Land Art find a particularly fertile common ground in young children's ways of exploring the world through all five senses, making ECEC contexts a privileged site for this kind of educational experience. These theoretical assumptions are explored through a qualitative case study involving three 0-6 services distributed across the Italian territory. Participants include teachers, educators, and a local community representative for each context, whose perspectives are gathered through semi-structured observation and interview tools. Data will be analysed through the identification of meaning aggregations, allowing for the emergence of recurring patterns and situated interpretations of how Land Art practices intersect with sustainability education, community belonging, and spatial re-signification in early childhood settings. The contribution aims to offer both a theoretical elaboration and an empirically grounded reflection on the potential of Land Art as a tool to act local and think global, connecting educational innovation, environmental awareness, and civic participation from the earliest years of life.