Gaining Representations of Children’s and Adults’ Constructions of Sustainability Issues

In this decade of Education for Sustainable Development, it is timely to consider the
methodological issues associated with researching this topic not only with adults but
also with the young children who, as members of the next generation, will experience
the success or otherwise of current environmental sustainability efforts. We argue that
it is important when making methodological choices to recognize that both the sustainability
issues themselves and the way individuals learn about these issues, are socially
and culturally constructed. In this article we are interested in ways of gaining representations
of individuals’ mental constructions of environmental sustainability issues. We
recount experiences from two projects, one which used the approach of analyzing
children's drawings to gain representations of how children in Mexico understand
environmental issues and the other which employed adult participant-directed photography
as the principal data collection method conducted mainly in the north of South
Africa.