Young people envisioning desired futures through narratives of change in science education

Abstract

Fostering hope in the context of the sustainability crisis requires cultivating awareness of the socio-scientific issues at stake and how the current social, technological, political, and economic systems involved in the crisis can be transformed. The ability to imagine and narrate more sustainable futures has only recently begun to receive attention in environmental and science education research. Drawing from literature discussing quality criteria for future visions, the current study advances this emerging area of research by investigating how 273 upper secondary and high school students from Norway, Italy, Germany, and Austria in science education describe their desired futures and pathways toward them. In the analysis, we explore how the narratives construe the desired futures, agency, and responsibility. The results of the study show an acknowledgment of the need to take drastic action for sustainability. In the pathways toward the future, the narratives describe cause-and-effect relationships between actors and sociopolitical structures in unidirectional and unspecified ways. We suggest that education can contribute to supporting students’ development of narratives of change by consciously enhancing students’ relational understanding of agency including its dependency on political structures and personal positioning.