Conference Agenda

There is increasing attention to the role of education in teaching environmental issues such as climate change (Teach the Future, n.d.). Whilst environmental issues are science-dependent, science is not sufficient to respond to today’s environmental challenges. Yet internationally, science and geography are those subjects most likely to include environmental content (UNESCO, 2021). In England, students can expect to learn about environmental challenges including climate change, biodiversity and pollution during their compulsory science education (DfE, 2013). These topics are often controversial, rife with moral tensions (Zeidler, Herman, & Sadler, 2019), and characterised by both descriptive facts and normative values. The values often deal with solutions to the problems, what kind of actions can be taken on an individual or societal level and even what kind of society is preferred. This makes the issues both scientific and political. Yet little is known about how politics enters the science classroom. In this study, we aim to understand how environmental politics enters the classroom, and how science teachers address different approaches to political participation with their students.

In order to develop democratic environmental governance, there is a need for representation of different groups of people, opportunities for participation and for spaces for deliberation (Lidskog & Elander, 2007), i.e. for politics. Schools are potential sites for participation and deliberation and for learning democracy (Biesta & Lawy, 2006). Politics can be defined in different ways, from a narrow focus on electoral processes to broader conceptualisations which include different ways of making decisions and shaping power relations. In this study, we are concerned with power and social change (Dahl & Stinebrickner, 2003) i.e. “the capacity for agency and deliberation in situations of genuine collective or social choice” (Hay, 2007, p. 77) through science education. This definition of politics goes beyond electoral and party politics and includes activities outside formal political institutions. This is in accordance with Heywood (1999)’s characterisation of politics as an a social activity that arises out of interaction between or among people, which develops out of diversity (the existence of different interests, wants, needs and goals), and which relates to collective decisions which are regarded as binding upon a group of people. Carter (2018) identifies the environment as a policy problem for several reasons, including that the environment can be considered a public good, with complex and interdependent relationships between people and ecosystems acting across national borders with consequences felt into the future.

This characterisation of politics is relevant to the study context as education is a social activity which brings together people with different views, interests and goals in relation to the environment, and it is a context in which collective decisions can be made, for example, about how the school function, what is taught (and how), and what actions or outcomes are desirable as a result of education. Not all of these actions and outcomes can be considered political and we see politics as related to societal engagement and political participation more broadly. Ekman and Amnå (2012) have developed a typology of different forms of participation in society. They distinguish between (a) non-participation (disengagement); (b) civic participation (latent political), whether social involvement or civic engagement; and (c) political participation (manifest political), which can be formal political participation or activism. Each of these three types of participation are further classified in terms of individual and collective forms. In this study, we use Ekman and Amnå’s (2012) typology to understand the ways in which teachers address the political dimensions of the environment in school science. The research question we set out to explore in the study is: how do science teachers address political participation in science education?

In this scholarly review we critically discuss the last 30 years of research on pluralism in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). Pluralism has been a focal point for a vast amount of theoretical and empirical studies in the research field. In this review we analyse the state-of-the-art of pluralism in relation to current societal changes and challenges. By placing three decades of research on pluralism in relation to key challenges that face democratic society and education, we outline prospects for future research and discuss what role pluralism can, and should, take in ESE research.

While pluralism has been addressed in ESE research for thirty years, we have witnessed three major changes that challenge pluralism as an educational approach. First, we have seen fierce polarization of public debate and the rise of post-truth politics that fuels political disagreements over descriptive questions, such as “is the climate changing due to human activity?” (cf. Aasen, 2017; McCright & Dunlap, 2011). Second, there has been an increased instrumentalization of education that has brought forth a culture of accountability and a focus on educational achievement in terms of measurable outcomes that can be compared and competing on an international scale (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009; Lawn, 2011). Third, the environmental situation and the ongoing climate change on this planet has come with an accentuated urgency for action, to put it mildly. The current societal, educational, and environmental situation puts pressure on pluralism as an educational approach to such an extent that one could wonder whether now is the right time for an educational approach that frames teaching and learning as an open-ended endeavour of growth and freedom. The aim of this paper is therefore to critically reflect on the development of pluralism in ESE research.

Pluralistic ideals in ESE took shape out of the normativity-debate in the 1990’s (Jickling, 1994; Lijmbach et al., 2002) and how they developed through theoretical discussions of relativism (Öhman, 2006; Öhman & Östman, 2007; Van Poeck, 2019). Rather than being an external critique against pluralism, the problem of relativism is theoretically used to further develop and improve pluralism as an educational approach in ESE. During the last decade, new theoretical perspectives have become a part of the theoretical development of pluralism in ESE. These are post-humanism/more-than-human perspectives (Kopnina & Cherniak, 2016; Lindgren & Öhman, 2019), decolonial perspectives (Sund & Pashby, 2020), and political theory such as deliberation and agonism (Lundegård & Wickman, 2012; Tryggvason & Öhman, 2019). The perspectives are new in the sense that they are new to the development and discussion of the pluralistic approach in ESE, even if the theories have a longer history within other fields of social science. The critique that is formulated from these theoretical strands is immanent in the sense that it is not a critique of the pluralistic approach per se, but a critique of the presuppositions, the epistemologies, and the implicit values that follow from pluralistic approach as it is formulated in ESE research.

For our review, we have scrutinized three decades of research literature, and critically engaged with these writings in the light of present societal challenges and what these may imply in terms of requirements for future research. The following questions guided our scholarly review: “How has pluralism developed theoretically during the last 30 years?”, “What empirical findings about pluralism have been important during the last 30 years?”, and “Does pluralistic ESE need to be revisited in the light of current societal, educational, and ecological evolutions?”.