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30 SES 05 B: Listening to Children and Young People in Environment and Sustainability Education Research
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30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Research Workshop Listening to Children and Young People in Environment and Sustainability Education Research 1: University College Copenhagen, Denmark; 2: University of Oslo; 3: University of Southern Denmark Presenting Author:Children are disproportionately burdened by the long-term socio-ecological consequences of climate change and ecological crisis (Wals, 2017), yet their perspectives remain underrepresented within Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) research (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020; Brückner, 2026). Even though participation and democracy have been central commitments within the ESE field since the 1990s, including within the Scandinavian traditions emphasizing action competence and pluralism, ESE still struggles with processes of exclusion and barriers to participation (James & Jørgensen, 2020). In a wider field of childhood and youth research, researchers exploring participation and citizenship suggest that children’s and young people’s voices - and silences - are unevenly heard and frequently constrained by entrenched adult–child power relations (Hartung, 2017; Spyrou, 2015). Methodological shifts from researching on to researching with children and young people (Cahill, 2007) do not automatically dismantle these asymmetries, as participatory practices risk becoming tokenistic or exploitative when adult willingness and capacity to listen remain unexamined (Sæther et al. 2024; Hartung, 2017;). This is especially true for children and young people marginalised by geography, race, class, linguistic background, or socio-cultural status, whose voices are often overheard rather than engaged within and included in research (James & Jørgensen 2022). To address this gap, the need for research that is attentive to what it means to be a participant or a student in specific contexts, settings, and communities has been emphasized (Barratt & Hacking, 2008; Brückner 2026). In recent studies, scholars call for new approaches to exploring children and young people’s experiences and perspectives in ESE, including giving stronger research attention to resistance and tensions in young people’s positions in relation to sustainability (Urberg 2025), engaging anti-colonial orientations in studies of children’s relationships with the environment (Ambreen et al. 2024), and involving children and young people as co-researchers (Rousell & Williams, 2020). In this research workshop, based on experiences from ESE research in the Scandinavian context, we explore central methodological questions related to the role, place, and voice of children within ESE research. Our ambition is to foreground and discuss these questions through an explorative investigation that assembles empirical insights based on three different research projects engaging children and/or young people within different settings. On this background, the workshop encourages discussion of the following questions: How do we as researchers deal with and explore the messiness, complexity and ambiguity of children’s voices, actions, and emotions? How do we incorporate methodologies that avoid idealizing children’s agency or projecting adult conclusions into their expressions? In which ways can we address the diversity of children’s lives and dreams? How do we listen to unexpected, silent or uncomfortable expressions? What do we do with questions of responsibility and ethics? All these questions indicate a need for us as researchers in education to reflect on the structural conditioning of children and young people’s agency. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used We introduce the workshop by sharing our experiences with working with different methodological and analytical approaches that engage with listening to and including children and young people’s voices in our research. Based on app interviews with young participants at a Norwegian multicultural festival, Elin Sæther and colleagues (Sæther et al. 2024) found that a change in their listening approach brought out other voices in the data. The app was designed to allow the young festival participants to speak freely on site, that is, without adult supervision and presence, as they were experiencing the festival here-and-now. Adjusted listening brought out the importance of the here-and-now, the carnevalesque and participants’ associative and fragmented narration, and demonstrated to the involved researchers what they had been prone to overlook. In her PhD project ‘On the art of teaching sustainability’, Mathilda Brückner (Brückner, forthcoming) includes an explorative study of students’ experiences with ESE teaching. She employs a palette of art-based methods during her facilitation of focus group interviews with 11–12-year-old students and investigate the multiple ways in which students relate to, share stories, and conceptualize sustainability. Her approach adds nuance to the affective and relational aspects of ESE teaching, suggesting that attending to students’ experiences requires methodological sensitivity, noticing, and engaging with the tensions, ambiguities, and dilemmas that arise across different enactments of ESE teaching, which otherwise are often dismissed or overlooked. Addressing the voice and experiences of young children in ESE research, Nanna Jordt Jørgensen presents methodological openings and dilemmas arising when exploring children’s everyday embodied, non-verbal engagements with the non-human environment. The presentation draws on experiences from ethnographic observations carried out as part of a collaborative research and development project (NAVADA) involving researchers, early childhood educators and children. Multisensorical ethnographic methods and analytical attention to children’s embodied and entangled politics (Jørgensen & Hansen, forthcoming) highlighted relationality, resistance and epistemic agency but also brought out interpretative tensions. Participants will be invited to examine and discuss examples of empirical material (drawings, video, interviews etc.) and methodological tools. Based on these discussions, we facilitate a common dialogue on methodological openings, ethical dilemmas and the theoretical potentials of strengthening attention to children and young people’s perspectives in ESE research. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings Through this workshop, we will share knowledge and experiences from our work with children and young people in ESE research, with the aim of developing our collective methodological repertoire. As researchers in environmental and sustainability education, our field involves and address children and young people, yet most research still privileges the perspectives of adult actors. Who we listen to, talk with, interview, engage and observe are central, and how we listen and pay attention will shape our questions, our empirical findings and our theory construction. Through post-humanist and new materialist approaches, the ESE research field has in recent years expanded and nuanced notions of agency and participation, yet we still struggle to include children and young people’s voices in our research. Attending to diverse perspectives of children and youth and the ways in which they are entangled in wider ecological, social, political and ecological processes and materialities, we suggest, is not only a matter of rights or democratic learning but also a necessary contribution to expanding research-based understandings of sustainability, hereby enabling more just, resilient, and co-created socio-ecological transformations. References Ambreen, S., Badwan, K., & Pahl, K. (2024). Attending to children’s voices within environmental education. Childhood, 32(2), 151-174. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682241299520 Barratt, R., & Hacking, E. B. (2008). A clash of worlds: Children talking about their community experience in relation to the school curriculum. In A. Reid, B. B. Jensen, J. Nikel, & V. Simovska (Eds.), Participation and learning (pp. 281–294). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6416-6_18 Brückner, M. (forthcoming). Exploring Students’ Experiences with Environmental and Sustainability Education: We-stories, Growing Forces, and Gloomy Futures. In N. Elf, J. Lysgaard, A. Reid, & T. Steffensen (Eds.), Education and the Green Transition: Exploring Qualities in ESE teaching. Routledge. Brückner, M. (2026). Students, Smoke, Sparks, and Mushrooms – Tensions within Sustainability Teaching. In S. Windsor, O. Franck & D. Sanders (Eds.) Paradise Lost? Love and Care: Narratives for and in Sustainability Education. Springer Series International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education. Cahill C (2007) Doing research with young people: participatory research and the rituals of collective work. Children’s Geographies 5(3): 297–312. DOI: 10.1080/14733280701445895. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., & Rousell, D. (2020). The mesh of playing, theorizing, and researching in the reality of climate change: Creating the co-research playspace. In Research handbook on childhoodnature: Assemblages of childhood and nature research (pp. 199–222). Springer. Hartung, C. (2017). Conditional citizens. Rethinking Children and Young People’s Participation Springer.’ James, A. & Jørgensen, N.J. (2022). Making space for children’s voices in climate action. NORRAG Special issue 07 on Education in Times of Climate Change. 104-107. Jørgensen, N.J. & Hansen, S.K. (forthcoming). The politics of children’s engagements with sticks. Children’s participation in nature, science and sustainability education. Rousell, D., & Williams, D. R. (2020). Section introduction: Ecological aesthetics: New spaces, directions, and potentials. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on childhoodnature (pp. 1603–1617). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67286-1_86 Spyrou S (2016) Researching children’s silences: exploring the fullness of voice in childhood research. Childhood 23(1): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568215571618 Sæther, E., Kjørven, O. K., Dewilde, J., & Skrefsrud, T.-A. (2024). Listening to young people’s voices: Attempts at developing context- and participant-sensitive approaches. Childhood, 31(2), 176-191. Linnea Urberg (06 Mar 2025): Conflicts of interest in environmental and sustainability education, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research,https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682241246394 Wals, A. E. J. (2017). Sustainability by default: Co-creating care and relationality in early childhood education. International Journal of Early Childhood, 49 (2), 155–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-017-0180-x | ||