General description on research questions, objectives

Sustainability issues are characterized by a high degree of complexity and uncertainties, without obvious answers (Lönngren & Van Poeck, 2021) and researchers are investigating how to handle this in educational settings (Bascope, Perasso & Reiss, 2019). Sustainability problems often contain conflicting opinions concerning how to act, and to avoid normative teaching a teacher can stimulate questioning and critically assessing habits and what is taken for granted (Van Poeck, 2019). It is therefore important for preschool teachers to highlight different perspectives, values ​​and arguments in the teaching situation. A pluralistic teaching that links facts and values ​​can afford children to try different proposals for sustainable solutions (Hedefalk, Caiman & Ottander, 2022). Hence, the teacher needs to create learning situations where children listen to each other and challenge each other’s ideas with the common ambition to solve a sustainability problem (Englund 2006).

Researchers also suggest that the teacher needs to listen to children’s questions (Halvars, 2021) to understand their perspectives, to create teaching situations where agency is at a fore (Siry & Brendel, 2016). It appears to be a consensus among researchers that little attention is paid to children’s agency about sustainability issues (e.g. Borg & Pramling Samuelsson, 2022). Borg and Pramling Samuelsson (2022) have investigated agency in the Swedish curriculum for preschool. The result show that in the curriculum, children is described as competent to actively participate and influence their learning. In this study we investigate how the curriculum's goals is translated into actions in practice. Researchers mean that teachers often show an urge to take over the teaching content which hinder children's agency (Grindheim et al., 2019). Hence, for agency to arise, teacher’s actions seem to be important.

Agency is not something children “have”, it emerges in interactions (Caiman & Lundegård, 2014). We broadly defined agency as children’s ability to influence their own learning in a teaching situation, having your voice heard and your opinions respected (cf. Hedefalk, Caiman, Ottander, & Almqvist, 2020; Halvars, 2021). Houen (2016) discovered that teacher’s questions in line with “I wonder…” opened up for agency. Halvars and colleagues (2022) took another focus; how agency emerge when preschool teachers immerse themselves into children’s questions.

In this study we investigate what enables agency by analyzing preschool teachers’ actions in teaching situations. Research question: what actions result in agency in a teaching project for sustainable development?

Theoretical framework

To understand the meaning making process in a teaching situation, we use pragmatism (Dewey, 1938/1997). According to this action-oriented theory, meaning making is observable in actions and in a context. The context in this study is the location of a preschool where children participate in teaching situations with a focus to develop knowledge about sustainable consumption. The analysis of meaning making begins when these children encounter an urgent problem that occurs as the children's previous habits are challenged (c.f Van Poeck & Östman, 2020 p. 6). In this case, the teacher creates a problem as she questions the sustainability of the fruit these children are consuming. We use epistemological move analysis (EMA) to analyze how the teacher privileges certain actions and exclude others in the teaching situation. By privileging some things over others, meaning-making takes a certain direction and in this study we are interested in what actions privilege agency in teaching situations with the aim to develop knowledge about sustainable consumption. Previous research has found several moves, most common in science education is: confirming, reconstructing, instructive, generating and reorienting moves (Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman, 2006).

In the present study, we examine how teachers’ actions, analyzed with help of EMA, affect preschool children's agency when working with a sustainable consumption project. We analyze what actions opens up for the children to influence the teaching content, hence becoming active agents (cf. Borg & Pramling, 2022). We have transcribed video recordings from teaching situations in a group of children taught by a preschool teacher. We use empirics where a preschool teacher and five children are investigating transport of oranges to the preschools fruit basket in a sustainable way, resulting in 2 hours and 17 minutes video recordings. The study follows the ethical principles of the Swedish Research Council (codex.uu.se), accordingly the parents have signed a letter of consent, as well as the teachers. The children were asked if they wanted to participate, they were also informed that they could stop the video recordings at any point. All names were anonymized. Context During an excursion, the children discovered an apple tree, full of fruit in the crown but also a lot of fruit that had fallen to the ground. The children were critical of the fact that the apples were allowed to lie and rot instead of being taken care of. They brought their thoughts back to the preschool and during an assembly the preschool teacher chose to discuss the preschool's fruit basket and sustainable consumption. They talked about the fruit in the basket and reflected on where it came from. No fruit in the fruit basket came from the apple tree outside the preschool. The children choose a fruit from the fruit basket that they could examine in more detail and the choice landed on the orange.

Preliminary results show a willingness to make use of children's thoughts about sustainability in the teaching situation. The teacher creates opportunities for the children to influence the teaching content, hence we see actions that creates agency. The teacher payed attention to what the children showed interest in and decided to make a teaching project out of the interest of sustainable consumption, expressed by the children. The children choose what fruit to investigate further and they came up with several hypotheses of (sustainable/not sustainable) transport ways for the fruit to reach Sweden. The children were generous with expressing different ideas and thoughts about the matter. It is clear that the preschool teacher is open to all possible ideas as all the expressed ideas were confirmed with positive utterances from the teacher. Often in teaching situations, the teacher asks questions and a child answers but during this activity we observed many spontaneous answers where the children filled in for each other and got involved in each other's proposed solutions. The teacher also kept the focus clear - to investigate how oranges are transported to Sweden, small detours are ok and a little fun and jokes but then she brings the children back to the teaching purpose. We can see that the teacher is a good listener as the group of children immerse in to a sustainable problem.

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