Mediating between advocacy and freedom of thought: narrative approaches to a tension in sustainability education

When sustainability is on the agenda, school and education are often assigned a key societal role in providing relevant knowledge and values. However, sustainability advocacy could be problematic when considered against parents’ and children’s formal rights to freedom of thought/belief, creating an ethical tension for teachers. We suggest that classrooms should be pedagogical interspaces and then argue for a narrative ethics approach focusing on utopian visions of sustainable society, without compromising individual agency. Imaginary futures, like fiction, offer to students knowledge of the possibilities to see and preparation for possible scenarios. Narratives also constitute contexts where the individual can expand their perspective, where it may be important to let conflicting narratives clash, allowing for enlarged thought generated in democratic iterations. They also allow students to move between the individual and the planet, from past to the future, and from the human to the more-than-human.