What’s in Your Refrigerator? Children’s Views on Equality, Work, Money and Access to Food

Abstract

It has been argued that the early years have the greatest potential to impact on lifelong learning with regard to equality for sustainability (UNESCO, 2008). This study demonstrates how very young children may develop behaviours, attitudes and habits that can have a long-term influence on their actions with regard to sustainability. This research project investigated ways of thinking about poverty and food security with children in a low-income community. Fifty two children, aged six-seven years, attending a Western Australian public primary school were invited to share their ideas about families' access to food from a perspective of wealth and poverty. The single case study method demonstrated how sustainable development in broader terms may be addressed with young children to enable them to express their points of view on economic and social as well as environmental issues. Project findings indicated that the children understood the relationship between work, money and the capacity to access food. They also had an optimistic outlook on how to remove inequality, or 'how to make things fair'.

What about the Migrant Children? The State-Of-The-Art in Research Claiming Social Sustainability

“…Another important finding worth noting is that the issue of children's agency was recurring in many of the articles, and children as agents for change and the need to listen to children's voices was described both in relation to environmental aspects as well as social aspects of sustainability [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”

“…A holistic perspective in Education for Sustainability was more or less applied in an overwhelming majority of the articles (36 of 41). At least three interdependent dimensions-environmental, economic, and social-were described in almost all of the articles, implicitly or explicitly, and, while some of them mainly related their research, findings, and discussions to the environmental dimension [59,60], a large proportion of the articles explicitly supported a socially critical and holistic informed perspective on Education for Sustainability [21,40,[48][49][50][51][52]54,56,57,[61][62][63][64][65][66].…”

“…Other topics described as related to the social dimension were social participation, diversity, social and economic justice, human rights, equality, responsibility, and tolerance [40,51,62,63].…”

“…Although various conceptualizations of the social dimension of Education for Sustainability were found in most of the investigated articles, only a few of them had an explicit and outspoken focus throughout the article with aims directed explicitly towards the social dimension, investigating children as agents of change for social sustainability and their agency as global citizens to affect social justice. Hammond et al [51] adopted the term "social sustainability" in investigating children's perspectives on poverty, and they argued that working with children with Education for Sustainability and sustainable futures should involve working with social issues such as global citizenship, social justice, and human rights. Additionally, the articles of Reunamo and Suomela [62] and Miedema and Bertram-Troost [40] both conceptualized the social dimension of Education for Sustainability as related to global citizenship.…”

Methodological Strategies to Listen to Children’s Voices: A Systematic Critical Review

“…We merged these two categories in this section following the principles of group discussions with children which are well documented in the literature and which aim at creating a secure, friendly and non-threatening environment for children to speak freely alongside their significant others, their peers (Barbour, 2008;Vaughn, Schumm and Sinagub, 1996). We also considered that one of the main differences we found between using focus groups-following the authors' definition-in few studies, such as those of Hammond, Hesterman and Knaus (2015) and Sandberg et al (2017), and using group discussions in studies like those from Adderley et al (2015), Green (2015) and Wahle et al (2017), was the way in which the discussion was structured and facilitated. However, the main aim was the same-listening to what children had to say in a safe environment where they feltvalued and heard.…”