Abstract

This doctoral study takes shape in a context where climate change is intensifying and threatening young people’s well-being, rights, and present and future life. In response, education systems in Canada are implementing policies and developing new educational programs and materials. Concurrently, young people are mobilizing against environmental injustices through a wide range of actions. Yet their environmental engagement and mobilization in school settings remains challenging and inadequate. Through three articles, this thesis examines the transformational potential of young people’s everyday participation in connection with the environment in school settings. This study was conducted in two high schools in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), each hosting an environmental initiative, and within the school service centre overseeing the policies guiding both institutions. The initiatives included the Green Committee, an extracurricular school activity promoting environmental awareness and action; the Environment and Urban Agriculture program, an optional course within the school curriculum; and the school service centre’s Engagement Committee, created to deepen its understanding of participation. The year-long data collection drew on ethnography, comparative case study, and engaged and participatory research as methodological approaches, and participant observation, group discussions, and semi-structured interviews as methods. The first article shows the central role of families in young people’s environmental participation. It highlights how life contexts, intergenerational relationships, and collective action support ecocitizenship and foster transformational participation. By examining participation processes, the second article reveals the possibilities and limits of each initiative’s participation pathway—building relationship with nature, youth-led actions, and institutional changes. Layering these pathways emerges as a meaningful way to enable transformational participation in school-based environmental education. The third article examines three situations in which the doctoral researcher intervened to help create a school climate supportive of children’s participation rights. These efforts prompt deeper reflection on the researcher’s role, engaged research, and relational ethics that support youth allyship. These articles deepen the concept of participation in ways that inform environmental education, children’s rights, and everyday life. Overall, this thesis shows that youth participation in relation to the environment in schools is complex and multifaceted, interweaving relational and political dimensions of participation, thus reframing its everyday transformational potential.