Young sustainability activists as public educators: An aesthetic approach

Abstract

In recent years we have seen increasing youth activism on climate and other sustainability issues. This paper presents a theoretical framework for further research on young sustainability activists as public educators. The point of departure is taken in Latour’s argumentation concerning the need to create new attachments to the Earth. In line with this, we highlight the importance of aesthetics and experiences conceived as integrated sense-perceptional, emotional and intellectual faculties. The second part of the paper moves into social movement theory, to explore what role the Youth for Sustainability movement may have in creating new attachments to the Earth. Drawing on Melucci, emphasis is put on the movement’s collective identity making. Furthermore, following Rancière, the ability to interrupt the distribution of the senses is stressed. Examples of youth activism for sustainability are presented and interpreted, which points to the potential of children and young people to act successfully. The last part of the paper moves into pedagogical theories to explore how this kind of youth activism fostering new attachments to the Earth can be conceived as public pedagogy. We thereby refer to Biesta’s distinction between pedagogy for the public, pedagogy of the public and pedagogy for publicness.

What binds us together is the passion for what’s going on around us

(three young sustainability activists)

Introduction

As many other scholars, we are intrigued by the activism of young people in various countries in the world marching the streets for climate action. Today, youth are intensively preoccupied with the issue of sustainability in general and of global warming in particular (Bandura and Cherry, 2019; Battro et al., 2017; UNICEF, 2014). Their movement may have a strong influence on the sensitization of the public in the coming years.

Although young people cannot vote, they are stakeholders who could provide a powerful moral voice, arguing for immediate action to reduce emissions, and awakening their parents’ generation to the threats that high-consuming lifestyles and fossil fuel use represent to the lives of their children (Flora and Roser-Renouf, 2014: 87).

In the previous two years the movement ‘Fridays for Future’, initiated by Greta Thunberg’s disobedient action, has obtained growing support mainly among youth, but also among policy makers and ordinary citizens. Even many scientists are supporting the young people. An impressive number of German speaking scientists claim that the concerns of the young protesters are justified. They argue that ‘The young people rightly demand that our society should prioritize sustainability and especially climate action without further hesitation’ (Scientists for Future, 2019: 79). There is an almost unanimous consensus among scientists about these concerns. However, some scientists are sceptical about this youth activism. Barbara Böck (2019), for instance, argues that it would be more realistic and adequate for the young climate activists to engage in school with a regular education in natural sciences and technology. Yet, it has been shown that what the young have learned in school about the condition of our environment has been an important source of inspiration for their activism (Abade, 2019; Battro et al., 2017). Formal education has played, and will continue to play, an important role in raising the awareness of billions of young people about the condition of our planet. ‘The science literacy programs with children will contribute for a more eco-conscious generation, directly influencing the adults, with knowledge and effective will to mitigate the present and near future changes in climate’ (Abade, 2019: 2). Furthermore, other sites where education and learning take place have a more non-formal and informal educational character, with the Fridays for Future school-strikes as a prominent illustration. On the one hand, many educational institutions are outcomes of pressures from social movements. On the other hand, ‘educational processes and contexts are crucial to the ways in which social movements’ ideas, identities and ideals are generated and promoted, taught and learned, contested and transformed’ (Niesz et al., 2018: 2). In spite of this relationship, educational research on social movements is only an emerging and still not established research field (Niesz et al., 2018). As a consequence, the relationship between social movements and education is only peripherally covered in the field of environmental and sustainability education research (Læssøe, 2017) and in the field of adult education (Finger and Asun, 2001). For this reason, we have moved into the field of social movement theory to explore educational perspectives from there. We will thereby pay particular attention to the aesthetic dimension of these change processes, since the cognitive dimension is often overaccentuated in such theories.

In this paper, our argument is that youth engaging in actions to safeguard our terrestrial future indeed have an important educative role to play. Youth activism is a site where taken-for-granted ways of relating to each other and to the world are being questioned and where young people learn from their peers and from informed adults about what is currently at stake and, through their practices, learn how to deal with these challenges. We call these practices sites of public pedagogy and consider the committed youth as public educators. In this paper we will make clear how we conceive of that. We thereby do not limit our attention to the Fridays for Future movement. We rather consider the broader youth movement for sustainability that emerges in different shapes and forms and at different places in the world: in study groups, in local policy actions, in forms of civil disobedience, in media events, in the use of social media, and so on. Therefore, we will refer in this article to ‘Youth for Sustainability’ rather than to ‘Youth for Future’, ‘Youth for Climate’ or ‘Fridays for Future’, the latter terms being too explicitly linked to specific movements or groups.

An important voice in the science community that has inspired us when doing research on sustainability issues is Bruno Latour (2018), who claims that a fundamentally different attitude towards nature is needed. He calls this different attitude ‘a new attachment to the Earth’. In his view, all living species are differentially attached to their environment. He distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ attachments. Bad attachments are destructive to the environment and to ourselves as humans. Good attachments contribute to more sustainable living conditions. In his view, the world needs a major transition from bad to good attachments. Our research focuses on this transition, particularly on the role emerging youth movements may play in this, and on the pedagogical aspects of this transition process in the Youth for Sustainability movement. In line with this, we depart from the following research questions:

1. How do we understand the development of ‘new attachments to the Earth’?

2. What role does the emerging Youth for Sustainability movement play in this?

3. How can we conceive of the Youth for Sustainability movement as a ‘public educator’?

We will look for a response to these questions in a theoretical way, with reference to some concrete examples. The three research questions also structure the organization of our paper. In a first section, which is mainly philosophical, we explore the notion of ‘new attachment to the Earth’ and also go deeper into the aesthetic character of the transition into these new attachments. In the second section, based on social science theory, we explore the role of social movements for sustainability, particularly of the young, thereby referring to some concrete cases of youth activism and interpreting these examples in the light of our aesthetic approach to ‘new attachments to the Earth’. In the third section, which is pedagogical, we argue that the ‘Youth for Sustainability’ movement explores new ‘attachments to the Earth’ and acts, in many respects, as a public educator both within and without the movement. The young particularly address the adults, thereby shifting the traditional intergenerational relationships. In our conclusion, we pay attention to future research inspired by the theoretical framework developed in the current paper.

Towards new attachments to the Earth: An aesthetic perspective

The ‘Youth for Sustainability’ movement asks for a radical change in the way we organize our lives, our economy, our politics, and so on. They demand a sustainable future. Sustainability issues have increasingly begun to determine the political agenda in many countries all over the world. Since the 1987 publication of the Brundtland report Our Common Future, there is a general agreement to define sustainable development as a way to preserve the living conditions of humans for the generations to come. Ever since, the political debate on sustainability and its consequences has been deepened and intensified. Scientists have provided important data and viewpoints in this controversial debate. The voice of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour is, in our view, of increasing importance in this respect. His book Down to Earth (2018) is a plea for the redefinition of our ‘attachment to the Earth’. He argues that we cannot reduce the challenge of sustainability to a challenge solely for humans. In his view, a fruitful approach towards environmental problems presupposes a dramatic change in how to understand the relationship between humans and non-humans. He further claims that it will be crucial to leave behind the anthropocentric worldview that, in modern times, has shaped humans’ understanding of that relationship. The anthropocentric worldview implies that humans have increasingly considered themselves as the masters of the world, using nature as an inexhaustible resource for their own emancipation. For Latour, this story should come to an end. New attitudes and new affections are necessary (Latour, 2018). Humans and non-humans are all interlinked and interdependent ‘terrestrials’. Consequently, the human subject and the non-human object reciprocally constitute each other. Additionally, the object which attaches us, also makes us dependent; that is, terrestrials (human and non-human) must exist, not in harmony, but in an ‘'interrelated dependency’ (Marres, 2005). In a terrestrial perspective, this means that ‘the health of the environment is central to the health of the organism just as the health of the organism is central to the health of the environment’ (Houser, 2009: 208). And Tristan Gleason writes, following Latour, that ‘the terrestrial signifier brings humans and non-humans together as agents responsible for our collective survival and well-being’ (Gleason, 2019: 984).

Latour characterizes this new relationship between humans and non-humans in terms of ‘New Attachments to the Earth’. He introduced this concept in 1999, together with Girard Stark, emphasizing that living species are all differentially attached to what their environment provides and that the nature of these attachments is strongly conditioned by the circumstances in which they live. In addition, Latour (2005) argues that attachment is an inescapable condition. Humans are not only attached to other humans, but in multiple ways to objects. These attachments create specific alliances or bonds. In a contingent world, such bonds temporarily stabilize the relations between humans and non-humans, subjects and objects. In line with this, we cannot separate the subject and the object. They reciprocally constitute each other. For Latour (2005), the important factor is not the attachment pattern but the object to which the subject is attached. For instance, the attachment of humans to oil is conditioned by the car manufacturing industry. Simultaneously, this industry depends on the changing patterns and desires of mobility. We now experience that this attachment to oil has destructive consequences for the environment and, hence, that we will need to revise this attachment profoundly in view of sustainability. However, we cannot completely and abruptly detach ourselves from our attachments. Latour clarifies (2018: 27):

We can substitute one attachment for another, but we cannot move from the state of attachment to that of unattachment. . . . To understand the activity of subjects, their emotions, their passions, we must turn our attention to that which attaches them – an obvious proposition, but one normally overlooked.

Consequently, the choice is not between attachment and detachment, but between good and bad attachments, those attachments that contribute to sustainability in contrast with attachments that tend to decrease our capacity to live in a sustainable way. This is, however, a major political challenge. Who will define what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ attachments are: the politicians, the scientists or the wider public? The democratic public debate on this issue will be of tremendous importance. And the quality of this debate and decision-making will strongly depend on the capacity of humans to question their attachments in an informed way.

When young people today march the streets and require action for climate, they express a radical hope for a change of present attachments. They express a similar emotion to Latour’s hope for ‘new attachments to the Earth’. According to the purpose of this article, we find Latour’s argument for new attachments to the Earth relevant and substantial. However, it is not clear how Latour imagines processes of changing the attachments. As educationalist and from the perspective of public pedagogy, our interest is more practice oriented, in that we want to study how people make the transition from ‘bad to good attachments’; that is, creating new relations between humans and non-humans. And, since such transition is affective as well as cognitive, we need to study also the so-called non-rational elements. In this regard, a particular understanding of the notion of ‘aesthetics’ helps us to better understand the challenge of enabling new attachment to the Earth; that is, the process of moving from bad to good attachments.

The concept of aesthetics is often connected with art practices. However, we choose to conceive of aesthetics in a broader sense. From Aristotle to Baumgarten (in his book Aesthetica from 1750), and further on to Kant and Schiller as well as to contemporary philosophers, aesthetics has a much deeper and comprehensive meaning as theory on sense-perceptions and their relations to emotions and knowledge making. In this sense, aesthetics is not restricted to art and beauty but includes all types of perceptions and sensuous relations to the world. Furthermore, aesthetics does not refer to our sense-perceptions per se, but to the relation between our sense-perceptual knowledge and our consciousness.

In a similar way, the contemporary German philosopher, Rudolf zur Lippe (1987) insists that aesthetics is about the ways we as humans perceive, respond to and learn from sensuous impressions. It is a source of experiential knowledge in which not only our senses but also our bodies, emotions and mental gestalting capacity plays an important part. Rather than just serving as input for intellectual categorizing conceptual knowledge, aesthetic knowledge making is about practical experiences with movements and rhythms. It works in the interplay between practices and experiences. The sensuous-bodily practical learning not only consists of perceptual registrations but also of mimetic perceptual learning in which we (a) observe, (b) mimetic test and/or relate what we observe to earlier perceptions and our experiences from responding to them, (c) act to influence, (d) perceive and feel the response (Lippe, 1979). Hennion (2017) adds that attachment cannot be conceived of in terms of causes or intentions. He clarifies that:

The justifications for attachment only come when they are called upon—to defend a taste, a practice or a habit; to share it with others; to oblige ourselves to renounce it; to weigh what it costs to maintain it, ‘live with’ it, or even abandon it (Hennion, 2017: 112).

However, aesthetic processes are not only perceptual generative but also fantasmatic creative. Creativity draws on the generated sense-perceptions as a source but does so in interplay with intellectual conceptual based knowledge. Schiller, in his Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man’ from 1795, criticized the scientific separation of the material, sensuous-emotional source of knowledge and the formal-conceptual-intellectual knowledge making, and made a strong argument for the necessity of enabling their interplay in what he described as ‘the play drive’ (Spieltrieb). By play, he did not mean gaming, but rather creativity by which the material gets form and the form gets meaning. It can be expressed in artworks but also in other life forms. These interplaying processes are what he describes as aesthetic and he uses the concept of beauty as their ideal outcome. The subject and the object of the aesthetic experience constitute each other: ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.

Several scholars claim that there is an aesthetic turn in politics (Bleiker, 2009; Kompridis, 2014). Gould (2011), for instance, argues that reason and emotion make up a non-rational dimension of politics and Goodwin et al. (2001: 10) argue that ‘emotions are part of the “stuff” connecting human beings to each other and the world around them’. According to Kompridis (2014: xvi) aesthetics is ‘much more than a specialized inquiry into the nature of art, artworks or beauty, grounded in a sensuous, usually non-cognitive, mode of perception’. Aesthetic(s) is something much wider in scope: ‘it is about what we are able to see and hear and what we are unable to see and hear’ (Kompridis, 2014: xviii). This approach is very much inspired by Jacques Rancière (2011) who understands aesthetics as ‘the distribution of the sensible’. To him, aesthetics refers to the ‘order of the sensible’, which is about the ‘specific distribution of space and time, of the visible and the invisible, that creates specific forms of “commonsense”, regardless of the specific message such-and-such an act intends’ (Rancière, 2011: 141). Hence, in this view, politics, as well as education and arts, are aesthetic because they relate to (the questioning of) the order of ‘what makes sense’ and to the power relations that constitute this order. In line with this, changes in aesthetic regimes often are signals or symptoms of changes in the way we understand the social, cultural and political order.

Our exploration of the concepts of ‘new attachments to the Earth’ and ‘aesthetics’ has revealed that it is hard to separate not only the subject from objects that constitute our social, physical and mental environment, but also aspects of aesthetics, for instance perceptions, emotions, cognitions, attachments that guide the actions of subject. Thus, we link aesthetics with the American pragmatist concept of transaction (Dewey and Bentley, 1989), which emphasizes that aesthetics is not just a matter of (passive) perceptions but part of ongoing transactions between humans and their environmental surroundings. This is in good accordance with Latour’s non-dualistic view about the human-non-human relationship. Hence, the relationship between the subject of attachment and the object of attachment is a transactional one. According to Garrison et al. (2015), a transactional approach to aesthetics concerns the felt sensory qualities and relations of objects, events or situations that elicit various emotions.

Hence, according to Dewey (1987), every experience and learning is not merely cognitive but always includes values, emotions and action. In this way aesthetic experience is an inevitable part of an experience that makes sense. Accordingly, it is of crucial importance to study aesthetic experiences, because they deal with people’s anticipations of how to proceed and also about what counts as fulfilment of purposes and aims, which are normative for action and for what students can learn. In short, an experience constitutes and is being felt in the transaction between an entire living being (body, mind and emotions) and its social, physical and mental environments.

In the previous section we have explored the transactional nature of our ‘attachments to the Earth’ and our ‘aesthetic experiences’. We have found that these attachments and experiences are the result of combined and interrelated cognitive, emotional, affective, bodily, activity-based processes that can hardly be interpreted in binary terms that separate the mind from the body, the cognitive from the affective, and the rational from the emotional. We consider these processes in a holistic way. This insight will inform us in the following section. We continue in the next section by taking a closer look at social movement theory with a special interest in its aesthetic dimension.

The emerging Youth for Sustainability movement

We are now moving on by exploring our second research question about the potentials of the emerging Youth for Sustainability movement in creating and promoting new attachments to the Earth. Youth as public agents is not a new phenomenon, cf. the youth revolt in the 1960s and 1970s. From this we know that youth can take action and influence the public and political spheres. However, the situation is different today. It is in some respect almost the opposite of the youth revolt 60 years ago. At that time, freedom and expansion were central themes. Today restriction and sustainability are at the core of the actions. Furthermore, neither the public nor the political sphere is the same. In order to explore the potentials of the Youth for Sustainability movement in enabling new attachments to the Earth in current settings, we will start by taking a closer look at social movement theory with a special interest in the aesthetic dimension. Afterwards, we will present examples of youth actions for sustainability and then conclude this second part of this section by interpreting these examples in the light of our aesthetic approach to new attachments to the Earth as well as the points made about social movements and aesthetics.

Since the rise of sociology, social change has been one of its key interests. This has not in the least been the key issue for the strand of sociology dealing with social movements. Social movements are characterized by ‘conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspects of their society by using extra-institutional means’ (Goodwin and Jasper, 2015: 4). Eyerman and Jamison (1991: 4) supplement this by describing social movements as ‘temporary public spaces, as moments of collective creation that provide societies with ideas, identities and even ideals’. This constructive dimension of social movements implies attempts to establish and promote alternatives to the dominant discourses, institutions and practices. However, what is lacking in these definitions is an aesthetic dimension. With reference to the previous part of the paper and to observations of Rancière, we can ask whether the protesting side of social movements also implies interruptions of the dominant distribution of the sensible. And with reference back to Schiller and zur Lippe, we can ask whether their alternatives also include attempts to re-integrate the sensuous-emotional and abstract-intellectual dimensions.

Although Eyerman and Jamison have pointed to the important role of social movements as sites of social learning and knowledge making, their approach follows the mainstream of social movement theory by focusing on the cognitive practices, while the aesthetic dimension is almost absent (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991). Compared to this trend, the work of Melucci is more interesting from our aesthetic point of view, since it explicitly emphasizes the sensuous, emotional and thus aesthetic dimension of social movements. For Melucci (1996), social action

is not the effect of mechanical laws or natural determinism, nor is it the incarnation of the spirit or a progeny of values; it is the result of relationships which tie together a plurality of social actors producing meaning for what they do (Melucci, 1996: 26).

Consequently, Melucci pays much attention to the development of collective identities and meaning making in connection with social action and social movements. In general terms identity is what people choose to be:

they choose to define themselves in a certain way not only as a result of rational calculation, but primarily under affective bonds and based on the intuitive capacity of mutual recognition. Such a remarkable affective dimension is fundamentally ‘non-rational’ in character without yet being irrational. It is meaningful and provides the actors with the capacity of making sense of their being together (Melucci, 1996: 66).

In line with this, he then treats collective identity ‘as an interactive process through which several individuals or groups define the meaning of their action and the field of opportunities and constraints for such an action’ (Melucci, 1996: 67). This process requires a continuous deliberation on the costs and benefits of the action and a permanent dealing with the plurality of orientations vis-à-vis the environment in which the actors operate. ‘In collective action, the construction of identity assumes the character of a process that must be constantly activated if action is to be possible’ (Melucci, 1996:: 67).

At the time when Melucci was writing, the objects of social movements were mostly social themselves. When dealing with the current sustainability movement it seems reasonable to expand his perspective on collective identity and meaning making by including their sensuous-emotional as well as intellectually reflected transactions with the non-human world. Thus, social movements are indeed social in the sense that they are targeted towards social change. However, from our point of view, we suggest to approach their collective identity and meaning making as not only social but inherently developing through collective socio-material transactions.

Social movements are sites of ‘learning in resistance’ (Beer, 1978), that is, through their struggle against the dominant orders. In doing so, they are potentially transgressive, yet they are challenged both by ‘inner enemies’ (from their own socialization into the existing orders) and ‘outer enemies’ (people and institutions representing the existing orders). In order to become transgressive it is, according to Bandura, crucial for them to develop self-efficacy and become successful in concrete cases (Bandura and Cherry, 2019). He suggests social movements to mobilize people by means of social modelling, meaning that concrete examples enable people to identify with successful and attractive alternative ways of acting individually and/or socially. This is a first step in empowering people’s belief in their self-efficacy. ‘Unless people believe that they can produce desired results by their actions, they have little incentives to act, or to persevere in the face of difficulties’ (Bandura and Cherry, 2020: 947). However, the opposite way, self-efficacy is also built through actions and mastery experiences. Although Bandura does not explicitly address the aesthetic dimension, we find his contribution interesting as it supplements Melucci, in that social movements’ transgressive collective identity making depends on self-efficacy and successful experiences enabling people to relate aesthetically to them and thus identify with them.

The co-author of the paper referred to above, Lynne Cherry, has been working in accordance with Bandura’s principles in producing videos about children and youngsters who have successfully taken action for the environment. These videos are of high relevance for our issue, as the young actors were filmed during their process. The results and their accompanying thoughts and feelings were filmed as well. While we cannot grasp what characterizes the Youth for Sustainability movement in general, as it still is in the making, we can explore these examples to look for the potentials of children and youngsters as political agents and for the aesthetic dimension in this. The material comprises 12 examples, each presented in short videos. ¹ For illustration, we will summarize two of these videos before we condense the general story line.

Three nine-year-old girls felt scared by the information about climate change they met in the media. ‘When we were little it was first time we heard about climate change. It was on the news. [. . .] I just felt despair. [. . .] It was just sadness. I didn’t think there was anything anyone could do.’ They became inspired by films on the ‘Young Voices for the Planet’ homepage and decided to do something similar together. ¹ ‘Working as a team is (pause) it give you much more courage than if you’re just working as an individual. If you are alone it’s always scary.’ Furthermore, as one of them tells, there was nothing different between the children she saw on the screen and herself and there was nothing they could do that she couldn’t do. In addition, they compared their fight against climate change to Harry Potter’s fight against the Death Eaters. One of the girls explained that ‘Harry Potter was born into that problem just as we were born into that problem.’ They found out that the town laws didn’t allow solar panels on town buildings. They got footage at the town meeting, presented together their arguments in front of its members, got standing ovations from them and succeeded in changing the law. Later they also succeeded in getting solar panels on their own schools. ‘After that it was like, what can we do now!’ Empowered by the success they continued by writing a petition to the local conservation commission in order to convince them not to allow a project that would damage life in the local forest, which they also have strong affiliations to as a wonderful playground. Their child perspective on the case was new to the commission members and also in this case their venture succeeded. Reflecting on their experiences one of the girls tells: ‘We have more power when we ever could imagine in our wildest dreams.’ ‘What binds us together is the passion for what’s going on around us’ (https://www.youngvoicesfortheplanet.com/youth-climate-videos/save-tomorrow)

A 12-year-old boy, Alec, saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and decided to make his own global warming homepage for kids including homemade icons, videos, animations and hands-on demonstrations. As his mother tells: ‘The passion has been Alec’s and he kept coming up with ideas like one night designing all these “I matter” logos’. His initiative mobilized other children in his area and they constructed and raised 100 several metres-high sea level awareness posts in the beach area where they live. At age 15, Alec made a ‘Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuel’ that was signed by children and presented to a senator on Capitol Hill. They also made demonstrations and his non-profit organization ‘Kids vs Global Warming’ continues to make actions and talks to audiences of youth and adults to encourage them to take action to help stop global warming. (https://www.youngvoicesfortheplanet.com/youth-climate-videos/kids-vs-global-warming)

In essence, not only these two examples but all 12 examples of the Young Voices for the Planet videos show children and youngsters who have been emotionally affected by the dissonance between media information, and/or lessons about environmental issues in their school, in contrast with the lack of action they experience at their school, in their community and/or in the wider society. In these cases, it is obvious that they take action upon their aesthetic experience. They decided to take a concrete public initiative, they received support, mobilized other youngsters, organized a group or community around the case, collected more knowledge in order to argue for their case, used social media, art and direct actions to gain public awareness, received mass media attention, interacted with key decision makers and were invited to speak in front of them. Their impact empowered them and motivated them to continue to take up other environmental cases and conduct new actions. Notable is also that the aesthetic dimension evolves in a double sense. In a first sense, the young activists act upon their sensuous-emotional socio-material transactions; that is, their attachments to the Earth. In a second sense, they use art in support of their actions (the three girls compare their situation with Harry Potter) or create, for instance, a homepage and sea level awareness posts to communicate their concern about their attachment to the Earth.

‘Young Voices for the Planet’ only tells us success stories and they may leave the viewer with the impression that action is easy and always goes well. Of course this is not so. However, the examples testify that children and young people actually are able to act, use media, get public awareness and become successful in making socio-environmental changes, by which they are also changing themselves in the sense that it strengthens their action competence (Jensen and Schnack, 1994) and collective identity. They are indeed not acting in total separation from adults. They are inspired by adults whether in their schools, in their local community or in the media. While preparing and conducting their actions they are drawing on scientific arguments and environmental NGOs. However, they are deciding to act themselves and they formulate their arguments by combining their emotional concerns with knowledge from different sources. Both traditional and new social media amplify their efficacy and play probably an important role in putting pressure on decision makers and gaining successful results.

The examples differentiate with regard to collective identity making. Among the 12 cases, some are and remain single person actions. Other cases, like the one with the three girls described above, empowered them and provided them with identity as an action group, which is strongly and aesthetically expressed in the quote saying ‘What binds us together is the passion for what is going on around us’. There are, however, also examples showing more large-scale forms of collective identity making. For example ‘Kids vs Global Warming’ was started by one boy, but has developed into a climate NGO. As this case also shows, aesthetic signs and symbols like the logo on shirts, homemade icons, sea level awareness posts, and demonstrations, where they walk and shout their demands, are important parts of their collective identity creation. At the same time, they are also results of creative processes combining their sensuous-emotional and cognitive sources in art works (e.g. icons, songs, design), social actions and suggestions for sustainable practices.

Another interesting observation has to do with how aesthetics is part of the young activists’ efforts to promote sustainable changes. Especially when they enter the public sphere and speak in front of decision makers, the clash between the children standing there, speaking with passion in the normally purely adult domain, breaks the orders of the sensible (cf. Rancière). Their way of communicating also has clear creative and aesthetic elements like, for example, when Alec creates a number of icons that in simple ways illustrate his messages. Furthermore, as children, they intuitively argue in non-rational aesthetic ways, combining their emotional affection with scientific intellectual arguments. Importantly, because they act upon their anticipations of how to proceed and also upon what they consider to count as fulfilment of purposes and aims. Hence, their action is non-rational without being irrational. They are not discursively fixed intellectuals and may as such intuitively contribute to promote stronger aesthetic attachments to the Earth. However, this does not mean that their actions are restricted to a purely local perspective. They are intuitively practising an exemplary learning approach (Negt, 1968) where the local cases do not just remain local but become connected to, and thus explore global issues.

To summarize, we firstly emphasized the collective identity and meaning making as a key characteristic of social movements and described their knowledge formation and communication as non-rational, as it develops through sensuous-emotional socio-material transactions. We did also emphasize the importance of the mutual generation of self-efficacy and successful actions. Turning to the ‘Young Voices for the Planet’ examples, we found that children and young people today not only are able to act as citizens, but also may develop their self-efficacy through successful cases. Furthermore, concrete cases that are in exemplary ways, linked to global issues and disseminated through media, have the potential to mobilize support and put pressure on decision makers. As goes for all social movements this is a struggle that easily fails but some of the examples also show that successful cases may empower children and youngsters to continue, take organizational initiatives and create collective identity around them. While this is quite similar to adult social movements, the examples also show that children may have an advantage in breaking the dominant intellectual and sensible orders in public arenas through their presence as political agents in adult arenas, as well as by means of their intuitively aesthetic way of reasoning and arguing. This links well to our third and last research question about how we look at this from a public pedagogy perspective.

Youth for Sustainability as ‘public educator’

In 1970 the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead published a remarkable, but controversial essay on the generation gap (Mead, 1970). She had, in her academic career, observed different cultures, particularly in communities that were far removed from the ‘modern’ world. This made her also reflect on the culture from which she originated. She took interest in the activism of the young generations in the Western world in the 1950s and 1960s. It made her compare the intergenerational relationships in different cultures. In the essay Culture and Commitment (Mead, 1970) she suggested that in recent times, increasingly all over the world, the relationship between the young and the elders had dramatically changed. We currently live in what she calls a ‘prefigurative culture’. This is a culture that, in contrast with older cultures, is future oriented, whereby youth cultures often give direction to, or in some cases even ‘educate’ the elders, about important life-orientations.

Here again we can take a cue from the young who seem to want instant Utopias. They say: The Future is Now. This seems unreasonable and impetuous, and in some of the demands they make it is unrealizable in concrete detail; but here again, I think they give us the way to reshape our thinking (Mead, 1970: 75–76).

In spite of the fact that Mead’s propositions have been criticized regularly, there is definitely some truth in them, especially when we consider the recent emergence of the ‘Youth for Sustainability’ movement. A particular feature of this movement is its future-orientedness. The young articulate in public claims for a sustainable future, while criticizing the relative immobility of the older generations in these matters of concern. The prefigurative culture also creates new educational patterns. It could be argued that a new kind of ‘public pedagogy’ is emerging, whereby the young both educate themselves and the wider public.

In the previous sections we have explored the challenge of developing new attachments to the Earth and how social movements can play a role in that. We thereby have described ‘Youth for Sustainability’ as an emergent movement. In what follows, we will explore how education and learning can be conceived both within such a movement and outside the movement. We situate this exploration in the relatively new tradition of ‘public pedagogy’. This is a theoretical and empirical perspective on practices of education and learning located mainly outside the realm of schooling. The Handbook of Public Pedagogy edited by Jennifer Sandlin, Brian Schulz and Jake Burdick (2010) represents an interesting attempt to theorize this notion of ‘public pedagogy’. Their concept focuses on:

various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning occurring beyond formal schooling.. . . It involves learning in institutions such as museums, zoos, and libraries; in informal educational sites such as popular culture, media, commercial spaces, and the Internet; and through figures and sites of activism, including public intellectuals and grassroots social movements (Sandlin et al., 2010: 1).

As we have seen above, the young activists who are worried about climate change mainly operate outside schools, yet their actions also have close connections to schools. Their movement mobilizes through face-to-face interaction inside and outside schools, it organizes actions through social media, participants meet in homes and in the streets, they challenge politicians in public places, and so on. One could claim, in line with the authors of the handbook, that these actions have important educational and learning dimensions. However, the educational, learning and pedagogical dimensions of the ‘Youth for Sustainability’ movement need more precision. Gert Biesta (2012, 2014, 2018) has made an interesting attempt to theorize the relationship between public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. He presents this as a continental European perspective, complementary to the predominant Anglo-American perspective in the Handbook of Public Pedagogy. In the section below we will position ourselves in connection with his framework on public pedagogy, while looking for a response to the question if and how the movement ‘Youth for Sustainability’ can be considered a public educator.

In his paper ‘Becoming public: Public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere’, Biesta (2012) distinguishes three types of public pedagogy. There is first the pedagogy for the public: a pedagogy that teaches the public particular values, insights, identifications, moral orientations, and so on. This is the most conventional type of pedagogy based on the transmission from the ones who know, to the ones who don’t know. In the second place, there is the pedagogy of the public. This is a pedagogy with an informal character, that is often connected with unforeseen or unexpected conditions, whereby people with varying capacities teach each other about different aspects of the issues at stake, and engage in joint problem-solving activities. Educators sometimes support such processes, while broadening and deepening the issue and enhancing critical awareness. The third type Biesta distinguishes is a public pedagogy that enables a concern for ‘publicness’. In this approach, private issues are turned into matters of public concern, while creating opportunities for alternative visions and practices to emerge and to be brought into public debate and action. In his evaluation of the three types of public pedagogy, Biesta privileges the third type and shows some scepticism vis-à-vis the first type as, in his words, it tends to treat learners as deficient, and vis-à-vis the second type as, according to him, it may reduce civic actions to a ‘regime of learning’. However, when looking at the cases of the activism of young people presented above, we often find an interesting mixture of these three types of ‘public pedagogy’. In many cases, the young activists are being taught particular insights through formal schooling. This is ‘pedagogy for the public’. Schools are often the place where basic information is delivered, which is necessary to engage with more complex insights, connections and actions. This was the case for the three young girls who successfully embarked on an action to install solar panels on public buildings. However, they were also frustrated by traditional forms of knowledge transmission, since that type of pedagogy created little opportunities to really do something about the problem, and additionally causing feelings of frustration and despair. The example of the ‘solar panel action’ also demonstrates how the young girls took initiatives to better understand the problem of climate change and how, on a small scale, positive actions could be undertaken. This is an example of a ‘pedagogy of the public’, whereby the girls ‘teach’ each other about problems and solutions. In doing so, they also make the issue of climate change public, including the problem that local authorities failed to do something about it. This indeed is an example of public pedagogy in the third sense, to the extent that the young people create public spaces of debate among citizens and policy makers, whereby alternatives to existing practices and laws are examined openly and democratically.

So, in spite of Biesta’s scepticism about the possible reduction of civic action to a regime of learning, we are convinced, as we have seen above, that in connection with social movements, important processes of individual and social learning can take place. We are open to the idea that, next to the public aspects of social mobilization, informal forms of learning are at work, whereby new behavioural patterns, forms of knowledge and attitudes are acquired, be it individually or collectively. The examples above show that, next and complementary to forms of social activism, intensive study of the issues at stake is needed, in some cases through the privileged collaboration with sympathetic educators, citizens and scientists. In such educational relationship, the young activists are not treated as ‘deficient subjects’, but rather as motivated activists, capable of setting things in motion and open to learning from experts the knowledge and skills needed to face criticism, threats and drawbacks.

Since we are interested in the processes of education and learning in the ‘Youth for Sustainability’ movement, we also need to understand how, in social movements, both individual and social learning come about. For the individual learning an author like John Dewey (1916), who has intensively studied democratic practices in connection with education, is still inspirational. Dewey introduced in the 1930s the notion of experiential learning (Dewey, 1938). He compared experiential learning to the journey of a traveller into unknown territory, who has to overcome unforeseen obstacles, cross deserts, explore water sources and climb mountains. Yet, when coming back home, he will have gained, in hardship, knowledge and insights that were not available before. In line with this, he made a distinction between non-reflective experiences and reflective experiences (Miettinen, 2000). Non-reflective experiences are related to habits that have a self-evident character, whereby particular events pass without further notice. Reflective experiences result from contradictory events, which create dissonance between the habitual and the new situation, and trigger a cycle of experiential learning. Dewey conceives of this cycle in terms of a process of reflective thought and action, similar to the research cycle of a scientist. It begins with a moment of uncertainty, leading to a definition of the problem, to a problem-solving strategy based on a hypothesis, to an inquiry and possibly ending with a practical solution and/or a new idea. Some scholars call such events, in line with Dewey, ‘educative moments’, which they conceive of as ‘a moment characterized by value conflict, value criticism, value creativity, and value judgment’ (Garrison et al., 2015: 199).The examples we have described above of the young children all show these characteristics which Dewey calls ‘experiential learning’ and Garrison et al. call ‘educative moments’. In line with what we have argued above, these moments are really educative when the transformation does not take place in isolation, but in the context of transactional relationships between different subjects and diverse objects, whereby aesthetic processes come into play. In other words, these moments are really educative, when they are ‘public’ moments which transform the relationship between subjects and objects.

Also the notion of social learning is, in many cases, inspired by Dewey’s concept of experiential learning. In recent times, interesting theories of learning in connection with collective practices have emerged such as situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998) and expansive learning (Engeström, 2016). A particular feature of these approaches is that they refer to attempts that deal with insecurity, with ‘what is yet to come’, or ‘with what is not yet there’ (Engeström). This also applies to the concept of social learning (Wals, 2009; Wildemeersch, 2014; Wildemeersch et al., 1998), whereby social learning is defined as the learning taking place in groups, communities, networks and social systems that operate in new, unexpected, uncertain and unpredictable circumstances; it is directed at the solution of unexpected context problems and it is characterized by an optimal use of the problem-solving capacity which is available within this group or community (Wildemeersch et al., 1998). This kind of social learning is experiential, in the sense of ‘learning by doing’ and it relates to joint processes of action, reflection, communication and negotiation. As we have seen in the section on social movements, the initiatives of the three young girls have these features of social learning. They engaged in action for solar panels on town buildings, because ‘they didn’t want to despair’. This made them understand better the issue of climate change (studying the films of ‘Young Voices for the Planet’). They worked as a team, with complementary capacities (‘if you are alone it’s always scary’) and they negotiated with the authorities (they succeeded in changing the law).

In our view, Youth for Sustainability movements are prefigurative in the sense that they not only criticize the lifestyles of the older generations, they also explore and experiment with new ‘attachments to the Earth’, and they engage in collaborations with scientists, policy makers and citizens who are open to their concerns. In line with this, this movement can be conceived of as a ‘public educator’ in a double sense. In the first place, it acts as public educator when it interrupts ‘the order of the sensible’, that is, they question mainstream or taken-for-granted views on the organization of our economy, our politics, our cities, our resources, our biodiversity. Its actions may cause moments of transgression, both within and beyond the movement. Yet, as we have seen above, they will also result in moments of disappointment and drawback which will necessitate new energies and forms of resilience. In the second sense the movement is a public educator because it necessarily will trigger various new teaching and learning processes. Participants in the movement will have to study the complexities of the issue, if they want to be taken seriously by other actors that either sympathize with them, neglect them or criticize them. They will have to learn about matters of fact and matters of concern (Latour, 2005). They will have to learn to deal with limit situations, thereby incessantly crossing and recrossing the line of success and failure. This kind of learning will be both individual and social. In this sense, the ‘Youth for Sustainability’ represents a very interesting case to study in detail aspects of a movement acting as public educator, and as a social movement-in-the-making.

Conclusion

This paper took its point of departure in the rise of the Youth for Sustainability movement as well as in Bruno Latour’s argumentation for new attachments to the Earth as crucial for overcoming the accelerating processes of unsustainable development. This led to the question about how to change bad to good attachments. To respond to this question, we suggested an aesthetic approach, implying both interruptions of the existing sensible orders and creations of transgressive alternatives. From this philosophical take on the question, we moved to social movement theory to explore the aesthetic dimension of their practices. Social movements are not only interrupting existing orders and presenting alternative opportunities. Their collective identities are aesthetic constructs, which are crucial for their strength, efficacy and success, as well as for the progress of the movement. Looking at examples of successful youth actions for sustainability, we identified aesthetic ways of arguing and challenging the adult orders in public arenas, as well as examples of collective identity making as part and outcome of their successes. In the final part, we then asked if and how the emerging Youth for Sustainability movement could be conceived as a form of public pedagogy. Here we first emphasized that the ordinary relationship with adults teaching young people in times of social change is potentially reversed, and that Youth for Sustainability may be seen as an example of such a reversal in the intergenerational relationship. We then introduced Gert Biesta’s distinction between ‘pedagogy for the public’, ‘pedagogy of the public’ and ‘pedagogy as publicness’ and identified elements of them all in examples of Youth for Sustainability actions.

Our considerations of the Youth for Sustainability movement have been predominantly theoretical, with minor references to concrete practices. We hope that this theoretical framework may inspire future empirical work. A further investigation into the practices of this movement, from a perspective of public pedagogy, would be quite relevant. Several questions could be addressed in this respect, combined with various methodologies of empirical research. We could further explore the relationships between generations and how they inspire each other in their quest for new attachments to the Earth. We could have a closer look at how individual and social learning interact in the context of the movement. We could investigate how the relationship between humans and non-humans is articulated by participants of the movement. We could research the changing biographies of the young activists and how their activism transforms their worldview, including their lifestyles. We could analyse how they exchange stories, or produce meaning, about their own future within and outside the movement. We could go deeper into the role of aesthetics in processes of transgression. We could investigate how young people express hopes for new attachments to the Earth and how they try to live in accordance with these hopes. We could explore the gender differences in connection with the learning processes. The possibilities of further empirical research are countless. The way the young activists have managed to enter the public debate on sustainability issues in recent years is remarkable and brings new hope for the development of new attachments to the Earth. We trust that the findings of researchers in response to these questions can help the young to achieve their important aspirations.