'If there's no sustainability our future will get wrecked': Exploring children's perspectives of sustainability
Children’s ideas about sustainability are developed through experiential, investigative, sensorial and place-oriented ways of learning
Education for sustainability (EfS) is described in the United Nations Decade of Sustainability document as an approach to teaching and learning that considers the long-term futures of the economy, ecology and the equitable development of all communities. EfS is based on the understanding that children and young people are capable of sophisticated thinking about socio-environmental issues and that they must participate in the strategic planning and action required for achieving a more sustainable world. In response to the importance of sustainability and children’s understanding and involvement in the process, Australia mandated sustainability as a cross-curriculum priority in their public school system.
The aim of this research was to investigate children’s perspectives of sustainability in Victoria, Australia. Sixteen children (age 9-13) participated as co-researchers in the planning of this study, meaning that the research was conducted with the children as opposed to on them. The children were from six different sustainability-active schools in Australia. During the initial phase of the project, the children were invited to share ideas about how to communicate their sustainability knowledge. They expressed interest in making things (later referred to as “sustainability artefacts”) through design, writing poems, construction and drawing. Later interviews with the children included a discussion about the artefacts the children had made. The interviews took the form of “jointly constructed conversations” to encourage active participation on the part of the children. Most of the interviews were conducted with individual children. A few children, however, who had collaborated on a shared sustainability artefact chose to be interviewed together. During the interviews, the children were asked to describe their sustainability artefacts and to share their ideas about what sustainability meant to them.
The children expressed strongly-conceptualized ideas about sustainability, which — as they indicated — were developed through interactions with material entities (both human and more-than-human) in diverse environments (e.g., gardens, wetlands, frog bogs, local parks, and farms). Four main categories emerging from the children’s responses include (1) planetary sustainability, (2) caring for the more-than-human world and the ‘web of life,’ (3) emergent sustainability knowledge in/from local places, and (4) imagining a sustainable future. From the children’s responses, it was clear that their sustainability learning experiences played a critical role in shaping their opinions and understanding about sustainability. A key finding, as expressed by the researcher, is that children become vital stakeholders in education for sustainability through experiential, investigative, sensorial and place-oriented ways of learning.
Citation
Green, M., (2017). 'If there's no sustainability our future will get wrecked': Exploring children's perspectives of sustainability. Childhood, 24(2),
