Engaging children as “agents of change” for the environment should be based on a consideration of structural and relational dimensions of environmental knowledge transmissionThe focus of this review is on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and its call to engage children as “agents of change” in their households, schools, and communities. ESD is about helping students learn the values, behaviors, and lifestyles consistent with a sustainable future and engaging them in positive societal transformation. Public policies and initiatives framed around this idea asks children to carry environmental concerns from educational settings into other aspects of their everyday lives and to influence the environmental practices of people around them. While there are criticisms to this dominant model of ESD, there aren’t many scholarly investigations into how children respond to ESD-related messages. Studies that have been done tend to rely on short-term experimental data and are limited in the extent to which they can address the complexities involved in family members’ long-term attempts to act on environmental knowledge.
Some of the complexities involved in expecting children to act as “agents of change” in their families include the extent to which parents acknowledge their children as ‘experts’ and their willingness to enter into dialogue with their children about related environmental concerns. Parents’ level of preexisting concern and their knowledge about environmental problems also influence how they relate to their children as “agents of change” for the environment. “Generational ordering” – where parents rather than children – enforce behaviors in the home is another factor influencing the extent to which children can transform household practices. The author’s own research identified additional factors related to a range of socioeconomic contexts. In households where resources were already limited, environmental practices tended to be based on the availability of resources, and messages about voluntary reductions in consumption are less relevant.
After a brief discussion on how children’s agency and interdependence relate to the research on ESD, the author suggests several areas of research that might inform the design of “socially sensitive” sustainability education. A “socially sensitive” approach would include attention to the structural and relational dimensions of environmental knowledge transmission.
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