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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1501126
This article is part of the Research Topic Educational Leadership and Sustainable Development View all 3 articles

Early adolescents' visions of the future: towards hopeful and sustainable futures?

Provisionally accepted
Andrea Corres Andrea Corres 1,2Gisela Cebrián Gisela Cebrián 1*Mercè Junyent Mercè Junyent 3
  • 1 Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
  • 2 Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
  • 3 Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) particularly emphasizes developing future thinking competencies. Nevertheless, this still represents a challenge among younger students, who tend to be left behind when deciding and visualizing the future within educational spaces. Through a qualitative approach, our research pretends to explore early adolescents' views concerning probable and preferable futures and how these are related to sustainable development dimensions. For this purpose, we openly asked 352 students from 5th and 6th grades of Primary Schools in the province of Tarragona (Spain) to explain their visions regarding probable and preferable futures of their city or town. We analyzed the data through an inductive-deductive approach. Our findings indicate that the presence of pessimistic visions of the future requires from ESD a special effort to educate towards hopeful futures. Different degrees of complexity in futures' views were identified in relation to sustainability, denoting the need to design diagnostic tools that properly guide pedagogical approaches and interventions towards developing sustainability competencies.

    Keywords: Education for Sustainable Development, future thinking competence, early adolescents, qualitative research, SDG 4: Quality education

    Received: 24 Sep 2024; Accepted: 19 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Corres, Cebrián and Junyent. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Gisela Cebrián, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, 43007, Spain

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