Conference Agenda

Addressing global challenges such as climate change and sustainable mobility requires a profound understanding of ecological, social and economic interconnections (Brand & Wissen, 2017). Children are key inventors in shaping a sustainable future (Sormunen et al., 2024), which makes it essential to explore and reflect upon their conceptions of sustainability-related issues at an early stage (Hauenschild, 2023).

Conceptions, often described as ‘mental conglomerates’ (Adamina, 2008, p. 19) include various elements, such as knowledge components, experiences, perceptions, attitudes, interests and values (Adamina, 2008) and are developed based on everyday experiences, everyday language expressions, general thought patterns and educational engagement with the subject matter (Reinfried, 2010). Understanding students’ conceptions is crucial for the adaptive design of personalized learning environments (Dockterman, 2018). From a moderately constructivist perspective on learning, teachers need to be aware of the heterogeneous conceptions when planning lessons on complex and controverse topics (Reinfried, 2006). Such knowledge forms the basis for learning environments that enable conceptual reconstruction through modification, enrichment and differentiation (Krüger, 2007).

Previous research on students’ conceptions in the context of sustainability shows that ecological aspects (e.g., pollution) dominate, while social and economic dimensions receive little attention (Sipone et al., 2019; Vasconcelos, 2012). In the context of mobility, research indicates that children often emphasise technological solutions, such as electric vehicles, while issues such as transport justice are given less attention (Kester et al., 2019). Similarly, studies on climate change at primary level indicate that students focus on ecological impacts, such as floods or rising temperatures, while social consequences remain marginal. When asked about impacts, children frequently mention rising temperatures, extreme weather events, sea-level rise, loss of animal habitats and altered rainfall patterns (Akaygun & Adadan, 2021; Anagbogu et al., 2014; Berse, 2017; Götz & Mendel, 2024; Ramos et al., 2022). Furthermore, existing studies on climate change rarely differentiate between students' diverse conceptions or describe developmental variations (Lämmer et al. 2026, i.p.).

For topics such as mobility, it is reasonable to assume that students’ conceptions are influenced by their everyday surroundings, which is likely to increase diversity of perspectives. To address this, we examine primary school students' conceptions of sustainable mobility in two contrasting locations. We differentiate between urban and rural students, whose experiences of mobility-related impacts and access to sustainable transport alternatives differ significantly (Braun et al., 2018).

This proposal involves two empirical studies that examine primary school students' conceptions of these two topics.

Study 1 looks at how students envisage sustainable mobility in the future. Drawing on theoretical approaches from a transformative Education for Sustainable Development (ESD 3) (Pettig & Singer-Brodowski, 2025), in which negotiation processes about a good life for all in the future are essential, the study builds on the concept of future visions (Rubin, 2013). According to this concept, future visions are defined as mental constructions of beliefs, perspectives, and assumptions about how the future might look. Thus, desirable visions (Hicks, 2007) for the future design of sustainable mobility are at the forefront.

The guiding research question is: Which transport transition strategies do primary school students consider to be particularly relevant for shaping sustainable mobility in the future (e.g. improvement of cars through electrification, transport justice through equitable access), and to what extent do these visions differ based on the students' living environment (urban vs. rural)?

Study 2 focuses on students’ conceptions of climate change. It explores how children conceptualise causes, characteristics, impacts and possible actions, and develops a learning progression that systematically describes the heterogeneity of these conceptions (Lämmer et al. 2026, i.p.). This approach is grounded in geography education research and aims to provide a diagnostic tool for designing adaptive learning environments.

Future dimensions are an inherent part of Environmental and sustainability education (ESE). For example, the uncertainties that come with sustainability issues, challenge our assumptions about the future, to the extent that what we have taken for granted, as a stable climate or secure access to food and water, now seems to be uncertain (Damhof & Gulmans, 2023). Consequently, sustainability issues pose significant uncertainties about the future, both in time and space. This uncertainty highlights an important distinction between the future, placed ahead of us on a linear timescale, as that which has not happened yet, and the imagined futures, which are created and formed in the present through our imagination. Thus, imagined futures are socially constructed images, visions, or ideas about what the future is like (Primus, 2025). Yet, the future simultaneously implies a time which is beyond our experience and something which we cannot have empirical knowledge about (Poli, 2011). This poses a problem for teachers in ESE, as the future is unknowable and could thus be said to be unteachable. Yet, it is simultaneously an inherent part of the content in ESE through concepts such as sustainable development.

The future has been described as the missing dimension of ESE (Hicks & Holden, 1995). Recently, a growing interest for future issues have started to emerge within the field. From this work, we know that the future images we hold are important for how we perceive sustainability issues (e.g. Ferguson, 2022), and that young people see negative futures as the most likely futures (Hicks & Holden, 2007), following current paths and logics in the present (Holfelder, 2019). Previous research also points to how teaching sustainability issues may lead to climate anxiety as well as other emotions such as worry, hopelessness, or anger, and that these feelings are often connected to concerns about the future (Hickman et al., 2021; Ojala, 2016). Furthermore, some scholars emphasize the need to incorporate more critical and creative futures perspectives (Hervé & Panissal, 2022; Holfelder, 2019), which acknowledge the openness of the future. However, a central concern for this paper is the question of how future perspectives come to be teachable, which still seems to be an open question for the ESE field.

Moreover, previous research shows that teachers’ choices are important for what students take away from teaching. Furthermore, every teaching situation requires choices to be made regarding purpose, content, and teaching methods. This entails a process of privileging, in which some things are included, while other things are excluded (Lidar et al., 2020). With this background, there is thus a need to attend to how different orientations towards the future are included and/or excluded in an educational practice such as ESE. The aim of this paper is thus to empirically explore the formation of futures perspectives in ESE through the analysis of teachers’ discussions when planning lessons. The research question is as follows: how are futures addressed and made teachable through teachers’ intentions and choices?

This paper adopts a social constructivist perspective on anticipatory practices, which is key to anticipation studies, a field that examines how futures are imagined, created, and influence actions in the present (Miller, 2018). From this perspective, the future is unknowable, and different future perspectives are formed in social practices that shape our ideas about and relations to the future. This approach assumes that the future is not predetermined but is shaped in the present through ideas and practices. As such, this study´s design enables an exploration of how teachers’ intentions and choices produce certain futures as relevant and others as invisible in an ESE practice.

One key rationale for educational activity and theorising is that better knowledge leads to better societies. Yet for considerable time, this belief has grown uneasy and self-critical, not least because of ongoing sustainability crises. Long suspended in this uneasiness, educational and social theory has oscillated between the urge to construct coherent visions of education and society and the impulse to pluralise or dismantle them. From mid-1900s onwards, variants of the word postmodernism have been used to refer to the historical-cultural condition “after” more optimistic and universalist sensibilities of modernism. Education is one emblematic site where these broad ideals are realised, challenged and placed at stake (Usher & Edwards, 1994); education both regenerates and constructs, and renews and deconstructs the world. In the present moment, education is increasingly often called to realise some vision of sustainability: to impact the future by impacting individuals and culture (Rasa, 2025). However, there is also a lack of trust in any such vision after the deconstruction of modernist metanarratives of “human progress” (Lyotard, 1984).

Education is interestingly situated between the modern and the postmodern. On one hand, modern ideals drawn from the Enlightenment informed the development of modern Western schooling and educational theory, shaping pedagogical approaches, the rise of standardized curricula and legitimising aims of cultivating autonomous, rational citizens while also pursuing state-building and economic objectives. On the other, educators have become increasingly aware of fundamental critique relating to, e.g., the legitimacy of scientific knowledge (see, e.g., Paz, 2018), while the role of education is also challenged by a rapid, interconnected, post-industrial, digital and increasingly abstract world – a postmodern world (Jameson, 1991). The emergence of discourses on wicked problems and sustainability crises is also tied to this modern-postmodern inflection point; however, while postmodern thinking questions human exceptionalism and domination of nature, it has been criticised as unable to provide solutions (Gare, 2006).

The unresolved nature of postmodernism has naturally invited the question of what comes after postmodernism, whether in history, social theory or in education. Indeed, there is considerable literature about post-postmodernism, such as “hypermodernism” and “digimodernism” (e.g., Eshelman, 2008; Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2015). More recently, various fields have been drawn to the concept of metamodernism, with these ranging from religious studies (Storm, 2021) and literature (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2015) to futures studies and politics (Fergnani & Cooper, 2023). This presentation, drawing broadly from educational philosophy, especially in terms of education for sustainability, seeks to explore what implications metamodernism has for environmental and sustainability education and educational research.

Currently, metamodernism has only sparsely been discussed in the context of education (e.g., Kilicoglu & Kilicoglu, 2020), and existing discussion has not clearly translated its meaning to educational issues. More problematically, at least two only weakly aligned conceptualisations of metamodernism exist in broader usage of the term. Vermeulen and Van den Akker (2010) define metamodernism as a cultural sensibility that oscillates between modernist and postmodernist features; Storm (2021) defines metamodernism as a new ontological, semiotical and programmatical direction for theorising within the human sciences. Yet, these metamodernisms also share implications for educational theory and practice.

In my presentation, based on two papers in preparation, I outline how metamodernism relates to sustainability education. I briefly discuss the fluid but powerful concepts of modernism and postmodernism in education, as discussion of metamodernism often requires some working definition that metamodernism is then articulated through. I then position issues such as hope, construction and deconstruction, pluralism and universalism and the educational subject as issues in sustainability education that can be investigated and theorised through metamodernism (see e.g. Tesar et al, 2021; Tryggvason et al., 2023).