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Sustainability education is mandatory in Swedish preschools, yet young children often experience sustainability issues as frightening, complex and beyond their influence. This study explores how preschool children (ages 3–5) can exercise agency and influence in teaching activities focused on sustainable consumption. Using video observations, teacher documentation, and children’s drawings, we analysed two teaching sessions involving six children and one preschool teacher. The analysis uses Practical Epistemological Analysis and Epistemological Moves (direction-givers) to examine how influence emerged during the process. Findings reveal a three-step progression – anticipation, exploration, and fulfilment – in which children actively deliberated and proposed solutions for transporting fruit to their preschool in sustainable ways. Teacher moves, especially generative, confirming, instructional and reconstructive strategies, support children’s participation and sustain a pluralistic, dialogic inquiry. The study illustrates how early childhood education for sustainability can foster agency and democratic engagement by treating children’s proposals as epistemically relevant and by keeping the sustainability problem open to deliberation.

To empower the young generation to bring about sustainability change is imperative. Living in Anthropocene requires new forms of teaching for sustainability in order to achieve such paradigm shift in regard to sustainability. We build on John Dewey’s educational idea ‘democracy as a way of life’, a pragmatic orientation which is in alignment with civic education conceptualized as ‘learning as participation’. The research project makes use of didactic modelling, a cyclical process where empirical results and theoretical knowledge have been processed by preschool teachers, principals, and researchers, in close collaboration. A new action-oriented model for teaching sustainability was developed and contains the following: A purpose continuous with an authentic sustainability problem; Children participating in processes that include creativity, deliberation and critical evaluation. These aspects are all embedded in an approach of preschool didactics. In addition, by incorporating children’s voices all along the course of action, an agency process is formed, and consequently, an expanded action repertoire for sustainability is achieved.