Educating children as sustainable citizen-consumers: A qualitative content analysis of sustainability education resources

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how children (aged 7–11) in the UK are educated about sustainability and climate change, through exploring a sample of 155 learning resources from public, private and third sector organisations. Using qualitative content analysis, key codes captured a) how sustainability was represented; b) how responsibilities for sustainability are imagined and allocated within society; and c) how children are encouraged to act for sustainability. The paper shows how sustainability resources represent children as powerful agents of social change charged with the responsibility and means to change their (and their close relatives’) behaviour within the household and school. Drawing on critical debates about sustainability education, I argue these representations are problematic because they do not equip children with an understanding of the political and moral economies that shape their actions (or inactions) as citizens, nor provide them with opportunities to develop collaborative competencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)
• consumer-citizenship
• climate change
• qualitative content analysis
• social connection model of responsibility

Acknowledgments

I would also like to extend my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful suggestions were greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Approaches to ESD vary across UK, with England falling far behind Scottish/Welsh nations.

2. See Hume and Barry (2015) for an overview of these differences

3. A climate change education strategy was recently published (Departmnent for Education, 2022). See note 1 also.

4. e.g., Education Scotland and HWB Wales

5. Some resources were pages long and included multiple lesson plans, whereas others were just one activity within a lesson plan. Resources were merged/split, so each ‘unit’ comprised a standalone activity with no duplication elsewhere.

6. For undefined documents, I made a judgment to select the dominant category.

7. Overall crosstab patterns for codes were similar regardless of whether all instances or only one hit per document was counted. The crosstab analysis can be seen in Figures 1–3 in this paper.

8. Please note I had a period of maternity leave between 2019–2020, causing delay between data collection and writing up. Checks in 2021/22 revealed Tesco resources were no longer promoted (‘Farm to Fork’ scheme was discontinued in 2017).

9. The non-descript category was used for situations directly attributed to humans—e.g., ‘we’, ‘humans’ rather than weather events like climate change.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [Small Grant/SG162451].

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Wheeler

Kathryn Wheeler is Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Consumption at Essex University. Her research explores how ordinary consumers respond to the normative pressures placed upon them to act in sustainable or responsible ways. Her recent work develops a holistic moral economy framework that explores the interactions and interdependencies between individuals, communities and political-economic structures. Her books include, Fair Trade and the Citizen-Consumer: Shopping for Justice? (2012), and Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies (2015).