The world's current environmental and climate crises are shaping the future in which our children grow up, which makes knowledge about how primary schools can and should currently navigate in this a subject of both existential and societal friction. This paper investigates how students understand, experience and relate to climate and sustainability issues, and how this informs their view on sustainability education. Despite being the primary concern of education, the students’ perspectives often figure in the background of theory and research concerning sustainability education (Brückner et al., 2023; Payne, 1997; Rickinson, 2001). Therefore, this paper aims to place the student perspective in the foreground by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at three different primary-level schools in Denmark that explicitly work with sustainability in their teaching and school development (CHORA, 2024). Based on ten focus group interviews with around 30 students in 5-6th grade, including participatory observation in different educational settings in and outside the classroom. These empirical findings are combined with focus group interviews using creative methods that explore different ways for the students to express their experiences of sustainability education, which led to several examples containing both local-global, here-and-now and future perspectives. Building on this, this paper presents key findings and themes on how students participate, perceive and experience sustainability education. To explore which frictions and potentials arise through students’ meaning-making processes, expressions of actions, and connection-making etc., with a particular interest in examples of how different forms of we-stories, are illustrating often taken-for-granted categories as e.g. we at this school, we as a group, or we as humans (Verlie 2019; Lehtonen et al., 2019; Gulløv & Højlund, 2015; Gilliam & Gulløv, 2022). Centering the student, motivates an examination of both the child, children and their context, and a curiosity towards different representations of sustainability that incapsulates and illustrates the entangled, transnational, and complex interconnectedness of the children’s world-building. Specifically, looking at examples of fire-fighting as a concern of the students, both in a symbolic and practical sense, as their descriptions, stories and illustrations about sustainability education connect and contain notions of flourishing nature and burning factories, this presentation will present a qualitative perspective on how to nuance the understanding of which different aspects and factors influence sustainability education and the student’s relation and imagination of themselves in relation to or as part of a sustainable future.

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