Sustainable development includes controversial values and complex issues such as energy consumption contra natural resources. This paper discusses a school project involving teachers from pre-schools to upper secondary schools in Sweden. The project aimed to support the teaching of energy issues and more generally sustainable development. During the first year of the project, teachers attended a university course as part-time students. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the meaning of an education for sustainable development (ESD) school project from the teacher's point of view. The research question is as follows: How do teachers constitute meaning in an ESD project? Through focus group interviews, I found three themes that illuminate the meaning of the project: awareness, confirmation, and collaboration. This study opened up two horizons: the meaning of ESD and the meaning of prerequisites for successful teaching. According to the results of this study, the relationship between social and ecological issues needs local relevance and people need an opportunity to debate the controversial issues.

In this paper we will examine how children view their future. Intergenerational relations are at the core of sustainable development. These concern a human’s moral responsibility to the coming generations. But, can we take for granted that future generations will have the same requirements and preferences as we do? Discussions of the future often take off from an adult perspective, but what would the visions of the future be, if children were asked? Theoretically the study is based on the life-world phenomenology. Our study was conducted in northern Sweden in 2011. Altogether, 22 children aged 11 to 12 years participated. They were asked to make a drawing to answer a question ‘what does the future look like when you are grown up?’ During the analysis, four themes emerged; technology, career, apocalypse and sameness. According to our results, we consider that there is an aspect of distance imbedded within the visions.

In my presentation I will discuss the ways children share their experiences of the future. During the year 2010 I conducted a pilot study among 11 year old children. I asked them to make drawings of how they see their future when they are grownups. All together 26 student participated the study during two lessons. This study shows that students’ visions for future vary according to their lived experiences. Pictures presenting their future hobbies, friends, family and housing seemed to be very close to their lived experiences. The importance of their existing social relations, friends and family became a starting point for their expectations of the future. Also the cultural ideas of the economical welfare were presented and individual careers played a crucial role in the drawings. Based on the pilot study (2010) I will focus in this study on the school situations where children share visions and make arguments to gain a common understanding of the future. The overall aim is to illuminate different time perspectives that are imbedded into the phenomenon of Education for sustainable development (ESD).In the study I will present the shifting of perspectives and sharing individual visions as a starting point. In the pilot study the dialogues between students become crucial for analyzing the results. Students shared, for example, the life-experiences, anticipations for the future and environmental knowledge. They mixed environmental and economical argumentation, developed ideas together and set critical questions to each other. The empirical study that I will present consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the individual visions of future, and, the second part on the sharing those visions. I am interested to illuminate in which ways children pose arguments for their visions and share individual experiences as well as anticipations for the future. Sustainable development raises an ethical question of the potential relationship with the coming generations. Furthermore, it is interesting to discuss ethical dimensions of sustainable development in relation to different time perspectives.

Boken ser på betingelsene for psykososial trivsel for barn i de fire landene i Barentsregionen - Norge, Sverige, Finland og Russland. Forfatterne gir teoretiske perspektiver på barns trivsel, og ser på hvordan disse kan overføres til praksis i skolehverdagen. Eksempler på vellykkede undervisningsopplegg gjennomført i skoler i Nordområdene er nøye beskrevet, slik at de kan være til inspirasjon for andre. Boken egner seg for lærere, pedagoger og beslutningstakere som ønsker å skape et læringsmiljø som fremmer vekst og utvikling, med vekt på psykososial trivsel og flerkulturelt samarbeid. Boken er et resultat av forskningsprosjektet ArctiChilden