Conference Program

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development identifies the realization of all children’s rights and the inclusion of those furthest behind as essential prerequisites for sustainable progress worldwide (United Nations, 2015). Against this backdrop, education is increasingly called upon to contribute not only to knowledge acquisition but also to children’s empowerment, participation, and capacity to engage with societal challenges. The planned presentation introduces the research project STEPS, which addresses issues of sustainability through an innovative, child-centred approach. Rather than treating sustainability as an abstract or exclusively normative concept, STEPS seeks to approach it from the perspectives and lived experiences of primary school children. In doing so, the project not only gives children a voice but explicitly aims to enable experiences of self-efficacy and agency – key foundations for meaningful participation in democratic school communities..

The theoretical framework integrates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (1945/2005) and Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology (2006; 2010), both of which emphasize lived experience, perception, and relationality as central to meaning-making processes. In addition, STEPS is grounded in the paradigm of Childhood Studies (Clark & Moss, 2001; 2005; Schütz & Böhm, 2021), which conceptualizes children as competent social actors, rights-holders (Butschi & Heddrich, 2021; Clark & Moss, 2005) and experts of their own lifeworlds (Langsted, 1994).

Building on these assumptions, the presentation outlines the project’s methodological approach, which seeks to establish strong connections to children’s lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and social realities (El-Mafaalani, 2021). This focus aims to address the well-documented gap between pro-sustainability attitudes and actual behaviour, which persists even when individuals endorse sustainability goals but struggle to translate them into concrete action (Ajzen, 1991; Stern, 2000). Methodologically, STEPS follows a Participatory Social Justice Mixed-Methods design (quan + QUAL; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). The qualitative strand is informed by the Mosaic Approach (Clark & Moss, 2001; 2005) to access children’s perspectives through participatory, flexible, and inclusive methods sensitive to diverse experiences. (Clark & Moss, 2001, p. 5; Schütz & Böhm, 2021) The quantitative strand – central to the planned presentation – examines individual differences in children’s values and their relationship to pro-environmental behavior.. Grounded in the Value–Belief–Norm (VBN) theory of environmental behavior (Stern, 2000), the study conceptualizes children’s environmental orientations as multidimensional psychological resources that may support early forms of civic engagement. While substantial empirical evidence links values and sustainable behavior in adulthood (e.g., Steg, 2016; Bouman & Steg, 2020; Wang et al., 2021; Jacobs et al., 2018), research in childhood remains limited. The project therefore investigates associations between children’s values (PBVS-C; Döring et al., 2010) and environmental orientations, including emotional affinity toward nature (CEPS; Larson et al., 2011), nature connectedness (NCI; Richardson et al., 2019), and self-reported pro-environmental behavior (PEB; Collado & Corraliza, 2015).

By examining the relationships between sustainability-related values and children’s environmental orientations, STEPS seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the foundations of sustainable behavior in childhood. The planned presentation will report on the results of the pilot questionnaire testing and discuss their implications for the final refinement of the instrument.