When undergraduates studying sustainability take action to make the change they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, they often meet large, seemingly ossified systems that deflate their sense of efficacy. These students enter our classes and programs with a passion to effect change. The participants in this research, for example, dedicated a semester of their undergraduate careers to move to an ecological field station to study sustainability. During this semester, participants worked to develop solutions to local environmental problems, but met various barriers to change during this process. How do students respond to these barriers? How do we, as educators, help construct opportunities for social transformation in the face of unsustainable, unjust, and inequitable systems? Using the agency/structure dialectic as a theoretical lens, this qualitative case study examined how students (a) narrate the process of social change for sustainability at various spatial scales, and (b) embody agency to work towards change for sustainability in their local contexts. Results suggest that students’ local experiences with sustainability work (e.g., classes, community problem-solving projects) are predictive of the way they then envision the process of social change for sustainability in abstract, leading to new and revised imagined futures. Results also suggest that not all students’ agency played a central role in shaping local systems, and therefore the ways they envision social change happening were constrained by their positionalities and experiences within their local communities.Implications for environmental and sustainability education programs include a call for long-term, collective action to (a) help our students examine their own narrated dialectics in time and space, (b) ensure our students have equitable opportunities to engage in local sustainability work, (c) develop a critical consciousness in predominantly White institutions about how local dialectics privilege White American narratives, (d) rethink what “local” means for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural American spaces, and (e) consider how our students’ local experiences with sustainability and working for social change impacts their learning.
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