Abstract
The authors of the paper aim to highlight that visual literacy, accompanied by lexical pliancy, already at the stages of pre-school education, provides a basis for multimodal thinking, interdisciplinary synthesis, and cognitive flexibility, which are crucial for a child to advance personally and later professionally. The development of a child across cognitive, physical, and social-emotional dimensions of learning is encompassed by the framework of Education for Sustainable Development. The present article outlines the results of a one-year project, “Sustainable Model Design for Conceptual System and Lexical Framework Pliancy Analysis for Perceptual Data Processing of the Preschool Age Actors” (2024–2025), conducted by the Institute of Digital Humanities of the Faculty of Computer Science, Information Technology and Energy of Riga Technical University (RTU) and RTU Liepaja Academy. The research project explores the conceptual system and lexical framework pliancy for perceptual data processing exhibited by pre-school children (5 to 7 years old) to perceive their surrounding environment, comprehend the contextual framework, and communicate efficiently. Preschool children from three preschool educational institutions in three different counties of Latvia have been engaged in the experimental study conducted from March to April 2025. Storytelling with drawings has been used as a method of data collection. Five concepts – dream, future, freedom, homeland, and security – have been chosen for the experimental study. A total of 169 children’s drawings and corresponding narrative transcripts have been obtained. The current article continues the line of inquiry developed in a previous study, which introduced the conceptual framework and research methodology (see Ivanova et al., 2025). The analysis of children’s drawings reveals that even at a young age, they can operate on multiple conceptual levels. They can define concepts by examples or opposites, focus on self or society, and imagine immediate and distant futures, as well as imaginary worlds and fantasies. The findings of the research demonstrate that efficient cognitive development not only strengthens pre-school children’s capacity to recognize and interpret elements of their surrounding world but also creates the basis for more sophisticated information processing skills. The findings offer evidence-based insights that can guide policymakers, institutional leaders, and sector stakeholders in designing development agendas aligned with Education for Sustainable Development.