Education for sustainable development (ESD) exposes students to complex, challenging and contested questions regarding the future of the planet and their own impact on climate change (Van Poeck, Goeminne & Vandendabeele, 2016). It is therefore important and interesting to study how students respond to and make sense of ESD and the paper asks how students construe sustainable life changes and the connection between their own actions and their influence on others?

The paper builds on data from an ESD project within social studies at an upper secondary school in Norway. In this project, the students and their teachers were to make a change in their daily life for a period of 21 days. Similar project designs are quite common, and build on the idea that people can make sustainable changes through altering habits. In a school context, the project can be construed as quite invasive as it goes beyond the classroom and asks the students to alter their behaviour also outside of school (see Todd, 2001). Since the students are still living at home, life changes also influence their families.

The participating students and their teachers documented their processes of changing habits and commented on others’ updates through a social media platform. The project utilized social media genre conventions, such as commenting and the use of hashtags, for instance #vegan or #saveenergy. These hashtags became the starting point for the next phase of the project where the students used their tags as keywords while exploring other social actors’ perspectives on issues pertaining to their selected field of change. In finding contending views relating to almost every kind of change, the students experienced the particular wickedness of sustainability issues (Rittel and Webber, 1973) and an absence of consensual solutions. For instance, students read bloggers advocating veganism as well as climate activists addressing the negative impact of transporting soya products from Asia to Europe in order to replace meat. Towards the end of the project, the students wrote a text describing their experiences conducting such change, discussing different perspectives on the kind of change they had made and, finally, discussing the consequences of their change on different scales, ranging from the individual, the family, the local to the global. Their submitted texts are the main source of data for this paper.

In these texts, the 16-17 year old students’ writing address their experiences. The project design also prompts them to take into account how their actions can be construed within different perspectives. When they are asked to discuss potential consequences of their selected change, the assignment pushes them towards positioning themselves in relation to sustainability issues and their causes and effects. In this sense, the project establishes a figured world within social studies, defined by Holland et al. (1998:41) as “social encounters in which participants’ positions matter”. Within this project, social encounters are taking place among the students, within their families and groups of friends, but it is also possible to envision broader encounters with more distant others. The paper explores the students’ articulations of different positionalities, such as that of the concerned consumer and how their care for others is being expressed. These are analysed in relation to theories of identity and agency (Holland et al. 1998) and environmental citizenship (Dobson, 2007, Hayward et al., 2015), with particular emphasis on representations of citizenship as private or public participation (Dimick, 2015). 

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