In education in general, and education for sustainability specifically, the future is always embedded, as education continually has explicit and implicit ideas about which citizens are educated for which future society. Combined with the great need for change and transition that the sustainability challenges require, it may come as a surprise that anticipatory competence is not a major focus in both Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) research and educational practice. Everyone has been taught history, but quite few have been taught visions of the future, strategic foresight or critically utopian horizons (Bengston, 2016).

In my research on the development of ESE primary schools in the welfare state of Denmark, I have asked school management, teachers and students which kind of school they dream of, and what the school of the future should look like in their opinion. Furthermore, I have done future workshops at the school with the school's stakeholders to qualify more collective answers about which school they dream of and can envision. With this material, this paper examines the questions:

Which utopian ideas about school do the stakeholders at three ESE schools have?
Which perspectives provide the answers in relation to working with anticipatory competence and critical utopian horizons in school development and ESE pedagogy?

The concept of utopia in this presentation leans on Ruth Levitas' (Levitas, 2011) broad definition of utopia as "The desire for a different, better way of being" (Levitas, 2011, p. 209) and her emphasis that utopian notions are always contextual and that there is therefore no universal utopia. In continuation of Levitas, it is also interesting to look at Lisa Garforth's work with modern green utopias and how the understanding of utopias also has a critical dimension that has the potential to become transformative and transgressive (Garforth, 2017).

As a framework, the project is also inspired by critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), which explains that by 'critical utopian horizons' is meant social imagination based on everyday experiences and utopian thinking without reducing the importance of a critical perspective (Egmose et al., 2020; Nielsen, 2016; Tofteng & Husted, 2014). Thus, the underlying critical dimensions that lie in a utopian notion and which also lie in the future workshop method used for empirical collection are emphasized.

The utopian ideas about school have perspectives for the development of ESE schools and perspectives in relation to educational work with future ideas. In an ESE perspective, the need for qualification of future imagination as a skill or competence is formulated in several places, not least in UNESCO's ten key competencies for sustainable development: "Anticipatory competence: the abilities to understand and evaluate multiple futures – possible, probable and desirable; to create one's own visions for the future" (UNESCO, 2017, p. 10). Thus, qualifying this is a didactic pedagogical task for the field of ESE.

Another direct pedagogical/didactic education-oriented view of anticipatory imagination can be found in Keri Facer (Facer, 2018), who criticizes future imagination in education for either thinking too rationally and without imagination, thereby embedding today's hopes and worries too concretely, or with too nearly- excessive hopes for education to solve all the problems of the future and thereby displace uncertainties (Facer, 2018). Facer argues that the understanding of future imagination in education must rest on a pedagogy of today, which understands itself as an ecotone, i.e., an ecologically fertile intermediate zone between past and future. Facer argues that school should not be a preparation for "known futures", but a space of opportunity and a laboratory for new opportunities and new futures.

The study is a part of a PhD project and is a multiple-case study in which I investigate three Danish schools that have worked with ESE for more than five years and see ESE as their most important development project. The schools are viewed in an ESE whole-school perspective (Hargreaves, 2008; Mathar, 2015), which means that the schools and their stakeholders are seen in a systemic perspective (Sterling, 2003). The empirical material for this paper consists of semi-structured interviews with school management (13 interviews), teachers (8 interviews) and students (6 focus group interviews). Moreover, the data material consists of future workshops reports (Egmose et al., 2020), three workshops with various adult participants from the schools and three workshops with students. The study has an abductive approach where theory and empirical analysis continuously fertilize each other (Shank, 2008). The basic theoretical starting point for the PhD project and thus also for this paper's analysis is practice theory (Schatzki, 2001). This means that the focus is on social practices (rather than on individuals and/or structures) and that action patterns are understood as both bodily, cognitive and communicative. The social practices have certain routinized notions on a collective level, which means that, e.g., underlying collective understandings of what school is and can do have an influence on how the participants can develop utopian ideas about school. In continuation of this, with Levitas’s concept of utopia (Levitas, 2011) and Garforth's study of modern green utopias (Garforth, 2017), the analysis examines how the participants' utopian ideas can be understood in the context of ESE school development. This paper explores the discrepancy between the expressed need for change and transition and a simultaneous lack of focus on understanding and developing anticipatory competence and critical utopian horizons. In continuation of this, the paper asks whether the participants' preliminary answers to future ideas about school can fertilize or point to pedagogical, didactic schisms and development opportunities if anticipatory competence must become a more important part of the ESE field.

The participants in the study largely point to the future as an essential aspect when they have to justify the work with sustainable development in the school. Asked what a utopian notion of a sustainable school might look like, participants' responses initially point to overcoming or eradicating structural obstacles such as lack of time and lack of space to experiment and decide for themselves, but it is clearly difficult for participants to think beyond the current structural framework. At the same time, and in contrast to this, these same people are concerned with sustainable development, experience a strong need for development, transformation and transition, and have high hopes for how education can help solve the enormous environmental crises (climate, pollution and biodiversity) and the social and economic challenges we and the planet face. When the participants are encouraged to think bigger and further, some of the most important tendencies in the answers are that the school should not be a secluded place, but part of a local community where school and everyday life merge to a greater extent in, e.g., forms of apprenticeship. This relates to notions about openness, a closer relationship with nature and the school as an open community that also provides space for the individual's choice, as well as for risk-taking and action. In the future workshops, the participants conclude in different ways that what they want is "more than a school". The answers partly point back to the participating schools' ongoing work and challenges in creating a sustainable profile, but may at the same time be linked to and fertilize possible schisms and opportunities where the ESE field can contribute to developing and strengthening the focus on critically utopian horizons and a sustainability pedagogy and didactics that take anticipatory future competence development seriously.

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