The significance of ‘participation’ as an educational ideal in education for sustainable development and health education in schools

This article examines the significance of the concept of participation for teacher meaning-making processes in education for sustainable development and health education. In Scandinavian public schools, education for sustainable development and health education focus on a wide palette of societal problems rather than on narrow curricula. Drawing on selected reviews of research literature on education for sustainable development and health education, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides inspiration for our analysis of the concept of participation, and how it is positioned and enacted in these fields of practice. Essentially, we argue that the concept of participation has a dual nature: it serves both as an educational ideal and as a teaching strategy. We also explore how the failure to achieve the ideal of ‘true’ participation may serve a positive purpose for the teacher; the acknowledgement that participation is not always as genuine as desired establishes a pedagogical situation where ideals of engaging pupils through true participation can continue to exist side by side with clear signs of a less consequential participation.     

Monitoring of education for sustainable development in Germany – insights from early childhood education,school and higher education

In Germany, the implementation of the UNESCO Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for sustainable development (ESD) 2015–2019 aims to implement ESD more profoundly within the structures of Germany’s educational system. In this context, a national monitoring has been set up in order to analyze the extent and quality of ESD implementation in all educational areas. The paper contains the results of an indicator-based desk research comprising a content analysis of key documents in three areas of education: early childhood education, school education and higher education over a period of 5 years (2011–2016). Overall, the main results indicate that, at the level of key documents, the goal of a broad implementation of ESD is not yet achieved, while there are considerable differences among the federal states. ESD and related concepts can be found more frequently particularly in documents that are more recent. At the same time, ESD is increasingly predominating other educational concepts such as environmental education. The results are one component of a comprehensive monitoring process of ESD-implementation on the level of documents and offer important insights relevant for further (political) activities aiming at a mainstreaming of ESD.     

Teachers’ objects of responsibility: something to care about in education for sustainable development?

Answers to questions about good teaching in environmental education can be expressed in different selective traditions. Questions as to what should be included in good teaching tend to be addressed by both teachers and researchers on an ideological basis. This qualitative study uses a pragmatist approach, and aims to make an empirical contribution to the debate. Rather than telling teachers what they should teach, this interview study involved listening to ten upper secondary school teachers in Sweden, and their arguments concerning their long‐term teaching purposes. Why should students learn particular things? The teachers’ answers revealed habits and frequently used the same arguments. These arguments recurrently dealt with what teachers particularly cared about, and five objects of responsibility were identified in the interviews. These objects of responsibility constitute the starting points of teachers’ actions and can be seen as personal anchor points within a selective tradition. These points of departure remind the teachers of their teaching aims and objectives, and at the same time, keep them within a tradition. While they help the teachers in their everyday practice, they could just as easily be seen as tacit obstacles to efforts to change environmental education into Education for Sustainable Development. The results are also relevant for science education in general. Issues identified in the study include how the same scientific knowledge could be used for different purposes in education, and the different personal anchor points for long‐term purposes of teaching based on teachers’ own ideas of good teaching. These results can be important in developing a reflection tool for teachers, which in turn can help them to reflect more deeply about how they might change their teaching practices.     

Socialization content in schools and education for sustainable development – I. A study of teachers’ selective traditions

This article studies content issues by examining teachers’ communicated socialization content. The value-laden socialization content constitutes the educational context for the teaching of integrated subject matter and has not yet been thoroughly studied empirically in environmental education research. The implications of the results can be fruitful in discussions about how educational traditions evolve, as well as discussions about the relationships between environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). In this study, ten upper secondary teachers are interviewed and their expressed socialization content is examined. Various qualitative positions regarding five important educational aspects can be described in terms of three selective traditions. To strengthen the validity of the socialization content found in this study, the students of the same teachers were interviewed regarding their experiences of the socialization content of these teachers’ teaching. This is reported in a supplementary article (Sund and Wickman 2011; Sund 2008). Together these three studies (this article; Sund and Wickman 2011; Sund 2008) work to establish and test a method of discerning qualitative aspects in socialization content. Although the amount of data is limited, the ambition has been to triangulate socialization content qualitatively from three different sources: a literature study, teacher interviews, and student interviews.     

Socialization content in schools and education for sustainable development – II. A study of students’ apprehension of teachers’ companion meanings in ESD

Subject content is always studied within an educational context. This context is constituted by the socialization content, which can be regarded as an educational content beyond the subject content. This is the third article of three studies (this article; Sund and Wickman 2011; Sund 2008) that together form a triangulation of possible socialization content of environmental education. A common purpose for these three combined studies is to embrace and visualize the important value-laden content, which is often forgotten in discussions about the development of education for sustainable development. It is not sufficient to merely integrate more subject content matter – it may also be necessary to adapt to a changed teaching approach, which also develops content in the teaching process. Teachers’ changed approaches convey qualitatively different clusters of ‘meta-messages’ to students. The first study from authors in 2008 developed an analytical tool consisting of five important educational aspects and the second, also published in Environmental Education Research used the aspects to study teachers’ socialization content expressed in the interviews. The present study examines whether the qualitative differences in upper secondary teachers’ communicated socialization content in three selective traditions are apprehended by their students.     

Students’ socio-scientific reasoning on controversies from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development

In this article, we study third-year university students’ reasoning about three controversial socio-scientific issues from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development: local issues (the reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees in France, wolves in the Mercantour) and a global one (global warming). We used the theoretical frameworks of social representations and of socio-scientific reasoning. Students’ reasoning varies according to the issues, in particular because of their emotional proximity with the issues and their socio-cultural origin. About this kind of issues, it seems pertinent to integrate into the operations of socio-scientific reasoning not only the consideration of values, but also the analysis of the modes of governance and the place given to politics.

‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable development used in Swedish schools. An analysis of how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constructed and maintained is done with help from critical race theory, whiteness studies and Popkewitz’ notion of double gestures, exclusion through intentions of inclusion. The analysis departs from five dichotomies: tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and helped/helping. We consider these dichotomies as cogwheels operating in an ‘Otherness machinery’. Through this machinery, ‘We’ are constructed as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good. The Other is simultaneously constructed as ‘uncivilised’ or as a ‘bad’ Other in need of higher moral standards. With help from these two Others, ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is formed. The ESD project could then be understood as a colonial and excluding project, and we ask how it is possible to avoid that ‘our common world’ only belong to ‘Us’?     

The effect of implementation of education for sustainable development in Swedish compulsory schools – assessing pupils’ sustainability consciousness

During the past decade, numerous schools in Sweden have implemented education for sustainable development (ESD) as an explicit guiding approach in teaching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of this approach in comparison with that of pupils taught in ordinary schools. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of sustainability consciousness to represent the holistic view of sustainability. Within the concept of sustainability consciousness, we combine and investigate the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development in terms of sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was developed to evaluate pupils’ sustainability consciousness through a nationwide study in Sweden. A total of 1773 pupils from the 6th and 9th grades participated. The results indicated that the ESD profile schools had a small positive effect on the pupils’ sustainability consciousness, while in grade 9 the effect was negative. The implications for further ESD implementation are discussed.     

Professional norms in school leadership: Change efforts in implementation of education for sustainable development

This study identifies and analyses professional norms as a means of illuminating school cultures and how norms are distributed in the system. Of special interest is the role of school leaders and how they lead, organize and realise school development. The study research question is: What professional norms do school leaders highlight in change efforts? We are also interested in identifying the support mechanisms and obstacles to implementation and norm setting exhibited by school organisations. The case we used explores change processes in the implementation of education for sustainable development at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. It was conducted in three phases, starting with a questionnaire for all teachers and principals. In the second phase, each of the principals was interviewed individually. The third phase used focus groups consisting of the principals that made up the leadership groups. Our results indicate that professional norms are set when principals and teachers experience expectations from each other, from students and from policy documents. There is also a need for well-functioning communication in the organisation to set and disseminate norms. The school principal plays a crucial role in these norm setting processes. By becoming more aware of existing norms in the organisations, and how norms can be changed, this knowledge can support principals in change efforts.     

Subject- and experience-bound differences in teachers’ conceptual understanding of sustainable development

This article describes the results of a nationwide questionnaire study of 3229 Swedish upper secondary school teachers’ conceptual understanding of sustainable development in relation to their subject discipline and teaching experience. Previous research has shown that teachers have difficulties understanding the complex concept of sustainable development. According to the Swedish curriculum, all teachers in all subjects should integrate a holistic perspective of sustainable development including economic, ecological, and social dimensions. This study shows that teachers differ in their understanding of the concept mostly according to their subject traditions. Social science teachers emphasize social dimensions and science teachers’ ecological dimensions, respectively. Teachers are aware of the relevance of the three dimensions to various degrees, but do not generally have a holistic understanding. The greatest uncertainty in teachers’ understanding is related to the economic dimension. Science and social science teachers are critical of incorporating economic growth into the concept of sustainable development while language, vocational, and esthetical–practical teachers are not. No experience-bound differences of the teachers’ understanding could be found, but recently qualified teachers consider their understanding of sustainable development to be poorer in comparison with more experienced teachers’ self-evaluation. The study highlights the need for further training in sustainable development since more than 70% of the questioned teachers stated that they need such training.     

How democratic is higher education for sustainable development?

We wondered how ‘democracy’ was being used and communicated within the higher education discourse of ‘education for sustainability’, or ‘for sustainable development’ (ES/ESD). We used a philosophical hermeneutic approach to explore the sense or senses in which the concept of democracy is used within this literature and supported our analysis by incorporating text about democracy from other disciplines. We conclude from our analysis that the concept of democracy within ES/ESD texts has evolved to suggest many meanings that in their entirety do not support our shared research mission towards ES/ESD. At the pens of ES/ESD scholars, democracy may have become one of Sartori's intolerably blunted conceptual tools.     

Pre-school children’s agency in learning for sustainable development

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in pre-school children’s meaning-making and learning in education for sustainability. Young children should be recognized as ‘agents for change’ and active participants in their own day-to-day practices. Such issues are thoroughly discussed in the early childhood education for sustainability field. However, only a few research reports are presented on the subject. In this paper, our purpose is to examine empirically how agency is constituted when pre-school children explore science-related issues in a context of education for sustainability. The empirical material consists of video-recording sequences of four- to five-year-olds. In the analysis, we use a methodological approach based on Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. We describe what a small group of children are doing and their ‘course of action’ towards ‘fulfilment’. In view of this, agency is explained as something that children achieve together in transactions rather than something they possess. Furthermore, the findings show the significance of the aesthetic relations in the constitution of agency. At the end of the article, we also discuss agency in relation to the ongoing debate on participation in young children’s meaning-making for sustainability.     

An intensive programme on education for sustainable development: the participants’ experience

This paper presents the framework of an intensive programme (IP) organised by UNESCO and addressed to young graduate professionals to prepare them for a career in fields related to sustainability. The aims of the IP were to address participants’ environmental awareness and to develop attitudes and skills related to environmental planning and management. This paper focuses on the methodological aspects of the educational activities and on the setting in which the activities were delivered. Teaching methods based on a learner-centred approach were used in the training. During the activities, 17 participants were provided the opportunity to experience various aspects of environmental integration and sustainability principles in key sectors of planning procedures in the Lonjsko Polje Nature Park (Croatia). The activities were evaluated using quantitative and qualitative tools such as the environmental education questionnaire, the training quality and involvement questionnaire and two focus groups with participants. The results showed the relevance of the setting and the methods applied to develop environmental awareness and skills related to managing sustainability issues. Implications for future research about educational programmes based on the development of sustainability principles are discussed.     

Gendered distribution of ‘knowledge required for empowerment’ in Swedish vocational education curricula?

Sweden is internationally commended for a high degree of gender equality, but many divisions in Swedish society, including the labour market, disadvantage women. This paper addresses gendered divisions of preparation for civic participation in the vocational upper secondary national curricula, which may participate in reproduction of the pattern. In a comparative analysis of the curriculum guidelines for different vocational upper secondary programmes, we focus on the inclusion of important knowledge for empowerment and how knowledge is contextualised in terms of valued labour positions. We deploy Bernstein’s concepts of horizontal and vertical discourse and Connell’s concepts of production, consumption and gendered accumulation. A general finding is that vertical discourse is contextualised towards discourses of consumption in girl-dominated programmes and towards discourses of production in boy-dominated programmes. Boy-dominated programmes include more knowledge that can be clearly classified in recognised disciplines or fields, whereas girl-dominated programmes include courses of undefined knowledge, such as creativity and entrepreneurship. We conclude that the vocational curricula reinforce rather than challenge existing gender structures in the labour market and wider society. In a historical perspective, it can be concluded that Swedish vocational education policy has a continuum of ‘gender-blindness', and thus confirming with wider norms.     

Starting the pluralistic tradition of teaching? Effects of education for sustainable development (ESD) on pre-service teachers’ views on teaching about sustainable development

There is currently a well-established belief among politicians, scholars and university representatives that educational systems can produce positive attitudes towards sustainable development (SD) among citizens. This article investigates whether Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in teacher education has effects on pre-service teachers’ perceptions of how to teach pupils about SD. The results from a panel study on the effects of a course on SD held at the University of Gothenburg (n = 323) is presented. The surveys consisted of questions about pre-service teachers’ approach to teaching about SD. The study included a control group (n = 97). The results indicate a short-term effect among the pre-service teachers towards actively getting pupils to discuss issues concerning the environment but without influencing their opinions about it. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the results for the idea of ESD in teacher training programmes.     

Perspectives of ‘STEM education and policies’ for the development of a skilled workforce in Australia and India

ABSTRACT

In an increasingly competitive world, it has been proved that invention, development, and profusion of new technologies through science and technology are the fundamental source of economic progress. Australia, which is one of the world leaders in education and India, which has the capacity to produce the highest number of young skilled manpower to lead the world, both understand the current situation and have signalled their commitment to restoring the national strategy for STEM education. The proposed study focuses on a comparative understanding of the interplay of inclusive policies, government’s initiatives, knowledge gap from the literature and potential future challenges that Australia and India could face in STEM education at the school level. The question we asked is: what are the important inferences and best practices in STEM education that can be mutually beneficial to broaden the Strategic Partnership? It is identified that the governments of both the countries are determined to utilise the young population to train them as skilled workforce in order to meet the future demand of industries. Australia’s constructivist approach to education and the well-defined system of vocational training outperform India, which is still following the traditional approach. However, Australia has failed to engage students adequately in STEM and needs to revisit the efficacy of the current education model, while India needs to espouse the well-defined Australian framework, which could help to enhance quality infrastructure, curriculum, constructivist teaching and transparent policy implementation. In addition, both the nations must work hard to attract bright students in the teaching profession in order to promote a conducive environment for scientific learning.     

Environmental education in Costa Rica: Building a framework for sustainable development?

Environmental education is commonly claimed to be at the centre of efforts to achieve sustainable development. Since the 1980s, Costa Rica has been one of the acknowledged leaders in efforts to promote environmental learning, and national policy includes a three-fold national development strategy which simultaneously promotes education, conservation and ecotourism. As of yet, however, what is happening ‘on the ground’ has not been examined in much detail. This article addresses this gap in the literature by providing an overview of the diverse programmes and actors involved in environmental education in Costa Rica, as well as analysing the politics of its implementation.     

Learning from all? The World Bank,aid agencies and the construction of hegemony in education for development

This paper explores the nature and quality of the participation that characterises the Bank's consultations with external actors and examines the extent to which the Bank is responsive to such feedback when it comes to defining its policy preferences and strategies in the education domain. It draws on a case study of the participatory process that was organised around the definition of the last World Bank Education Strategy (WBES2020) and focuses on the participation of three European aid agencies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Department for International Development of the UK. This paper acknowledges that a significant effort was made to promote the inclusiveness and transparency of the participatory process, yet it concludes that the conditions for promoting quality participation and substantive policy change were not provided. Furthermore, the way international aid agencies produce and use knowledge limits their role and influence in the context of the Bank's consultations. Hence, by not contesting the Bank's policy ideas substantially, the agencies contribute inadvertently to reproducing the Bank's predominance in the education for development field.     

Children’s participatory design for sustainable development and community planning

The urban developments have been carried out by only professionals for a long time because of efficiency and safety. However, most residents are ordinary people. Therefore, it is necessary to change the awareness of sustainable living environments, not only on the construction side but also the residents. In recent years, the number of cases of residents’ participation in planning, maintaining, and repairing increased. However, sometimes youths and children, who might spend a lifetime longer than adults in a city after the developments have been done, are not included in this “Residents”. Concerning youth and children’s participation, CFC (child friendly city) is one of the good practices for sustainable development. It was launched by UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) and UN-Habitat in the Habitat II in 1996. City governments, especially in European countries, started to view CFC as their key concept for preservation and/or sustainable development. CFC means not only being “Children” friendly but also “All people” friendly. Various effects have been reported since the Historic Cities/districts included CFC in their city planning as a common concept, especially in education, community re-development, and operation and maintenance by the community. It is expected that better city planning in preservation and sustainable development can be achieved by adding CFC concept. In this research, an ideal way of city planning involving resident participation and the possibility in the future are analyzed based on case studies. Then a strategy of sustainable development and community planning involving youth and children’s participation is proposed.