#179: Pursuits of Social Change: A Comparative Case Study of Youth Learning to Reduce Food Waste in School

In the face of global polycrisis, we call for greater support for youth to learn about complex problems and make social change. In this comparative case analysis, we explore how high school students engaged in a socioeducational ecology designed for the study of food waste in a climate education class. Conceptually, we recontextualize an established framework in the Learning Sciences (Productive Disciplinary Engagement) to reframe engagement as pursuit - a collective, interest-driven traversal of settings and people over time (Jornet et al., 2025). Through analyses of students' work, video presentations, and semi-structured teacher interviews, we find student groups emerging with different pursuits; encountering and responding to challenges differently; and reasoning through different articulations of the problem and solution. And yet, they uniformly expressed authority and a sense of accountability for creating just and sustainable futures. This study contributes new tools to design and study ecological learning and youth-led social change.