Carmela Therese L. Arcena is an early-childhood educator who finished a Master of Education in Expert Teaching Practice at Monash University, Melbourne. 

She is a passionate educator and strong advocate for environmental sustainability education committed to creating and providing learning opportunities that celebrate and support children’s process and progress at the early childhood level. 

Carmela has conducted and coordinated multiple differentiated classroom interventions as a Primary Learning Assistant at the British School Manila. In addition, she spearheaded and organised the Digital Citizenship Curriculum, teaching sessions with Information Communication Technology (ICT) as a Technology Coach at both Primary and Senior levels (2016-2019). In 2019, she was a speaker at the FIT2019 (Frontiers and Innovations in Teaching): Thrive with your Tribe – Developing 21st Century Innovations within a culture of collaboration, introducing coding concepts with toys for young children. She has also consulted as an early childhood learning development specialist with the Save the Children Philippines for Learning Session Modules on Online Sexual Exploitation of Children (OSEC). 

She was awarded the Australian Awards scholarship and dedicated her Masters studies towards learning and researching on environmental sustainability and Indigenous knowledge education for young children. Carmela is one of the founders of Beyond Play Early Learning Space, an early childhood education service based in Manila that provides distance learning (pandemic) homeschool programs, and playgroup classes for children aged 2.5 to 5. She is currently teaching and in the process of developing environment sustainability programs with Indigenous communities in Mindanao.