Elizabeth Henderson

Dr. Elizabeth Henderson is an experienced practitioner, manager, lecturer, trainer, and author with more than 40 years of experience in education. For the last 20 years, she has focussed on the early childhood sector. Using autoethnography as a methodology, Elizabeth seeks to humanise data to reveal the multiple complexities at work in a practitioner’s relationship with young children and their families. Her current research is on sustainability, indigenous pathways, and their relationship to Early Years work.

After completing her Doctorate in Early Childhood Education and Care in 2016 at Sheffield University, England, she went on to publish the first book in the Early Years sector on autoethnography – Autoethnography in Early Childhood Education Care: Narrating the Heart of Practice. She has also published further work on sustainability, outdoor work with young children, arts-based research in early childhood, and inclusion and diversity.

Elizabeth is the founder of several innovative projects in Scotland which include: Nature Nurture a project for children under the age of three years from challenging backgrounds, offering the opportunity to be in Nature and to connect therapeutically with the cycle of the year; and WIGLS, a Community of Practice to help support practitioners working with Nature and the outdoor context in their Early Years settings. Elizabeth also sowed the seeds that initiated the opening of the first Outdoor Nursery in her local authority, in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Elizabeth’s work is underpinned by love and the understanding that we build interior worlds with our children during their early development. She is a mother to two adopted children and grandmother to eight little people.