Educating Young People for a Sustainable Future

This book brings together the themes of education, social justice and sustainability, to consider the ways in which education could contribute to making the world more equitable and inclusive. Challenging hegemonic narratives and politics which increase social inequality, economic precarity and climate breakdown, this interdisciplinary collection of contributions centres participant voice to suggest different ways of rendering educational spaces – both formal and informal- more inclusive, ethical, equitable, creative, accessible and empowering of all.

-- Professor Charlotte Chadderton, Professor of Education, University of Derby, UK

Educating Young People for a Sustainable Futures offers a compelling, situated intervention into contemporary debates on education, social justice, and sustainability by thinking with education as a lived, contested, and relational practice. Emerging from collective pedagogical and research collaborations, the volume traces how inequalities are experienced, negotiated, and reworked within everyday educational encounters, refusing to treat social justice as an external goal rather than constitutive of education itself. Its critical engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals holds together their emancipatory promise and their entanglement with neoliberal and Western developmental logics, positioning sustainability as an open and contested project rather than a technocratic solution. Across chapters addressing institutional racism, disability, language, wellbeing, environmental education, and creative methodologies, the collection assembles a rich archive of voices and practices grounded in qualitative, interpretive, and ethically attentive research. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the book invites readers to rethink education as an ongoing process of becoming—one in which social justice and sustainability are sustained through relationality, reflexivity, and collective care.

-- Professor Maria Tamboukou, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of East London, UK

This collection represents the unique qualities of Education Studies: it is challenging, constructive, eclectic, engaging. Addressing education in a wide sense, it poses necessary questions about what becomes possible when social justice, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability are prioritised. It faces head-on the relationship between education and entrenched social, cultural, linguistic and health inequalities. Locating the people within practices and policies, the chapters are rich with the voices of those who have experienced contemporary educational norms as stifling, unyielding and unjust. With an orientation towards community, communality and the common good, the collection is insightful and inspiring; it deserves a place on student reading lists and practitioner bookshelves as it invites us to consider transformations of, and through, education.

-- Dr Mark Pulsford, Director of Education & Student Experience for the School of Education, University of Warwick, UK, Co-Editor of Understanding Education Studies: Critical Issues and New Direct