Heroes and villains: children’s stories of Eco-school learning as a scalar social site for sustainability practice

Abstract

This research reveals children’s stories of sustainability learning utilising a scalar framework to understand the influence of information flows. Eleven Scottish primary school pupils captured images illustrating their sustainability understanding which informed subsequent interviews. This research contributes to theory by examining the Eco-school curriculum within a scalar framework and providing empirical narratives that illustrate how children understand and assume responsibility for sustainability, as learned within vertical and horizontal scaling. In adopting a novel approach of listening to children, the findings extend scalar frameworks from organisational settings to examine sustainability discourse through their perceptions of who are sustainability heroes and villains. Within this, nuances of emergent activism and the application of local initiatives to ‘save the planet’ provide implications for markets, marketing management and policy development.