Actions for sustainable development through young students’ eyes

Abstract

Young students have raised their voices in debates on what action for sustainable development (SD) is necessary. Nevertheless, research that gives voice to 10 to 13-year-olds while looking into SD issues in all their complexity of interrelated environmental, social, and socio-economic perspectives, is scarce. This study aims to give voice to these youngsters, asking them directly how they suggest they can contribute to SD. Building on the concepts of action and SD, this qualitative study reports on early adolescents’ own suggestions for action. Participants suggested direct, indirect, individual, and collective actions both in the private and public sphere. Their actions targeted SD issues with interconnections between areas concerning the planet, peace, people, partnership, and to some extent also prosperity. We compare our results with findings of earlier studies to further the discussion on how young people feel they can and want to contribute to SD.

Keywords:

• Action
• sustainable development
• primary and secondary school students’ SD actions
• interconnectivity of SD areas
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to the young participants in this study for their inspiring cooperation and to their teachers for their much valued support. For their assistance with the transcriptions of the audio files we thank Rosanne Van de Vijver and Kobe De Maeyer. We would also like to thank the journal's editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The English version of the “Go Goals!” boardgame can freely be downloaded from https://go-goals.org/.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of the VALIES project and is funded by the Flanders Research Foundation (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, FWO) under grant agreement S010317N within the Strategic Basic Research program.