30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Paper
Possibilities and Challenges of Critical Approaches to Global Justice Issues Teaching in Sweden: Perspectives from Upper Secondary Teachers
Louise Sund1, Ásgeir Tryggvason1, Karen Pashby2
1Örebro University, Sweden; 2Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Presenting Author: Sund, Louise;
Pashby, Karen
Today’s climate changed world is marked by gender, racial and global inequalities whereby the least responsible for climate change are often the most negatively impacted. Global justice issues involve questions about “common but differentiated responsibilities” (UNFCCC, 2015) for the future of the globe and raise implications for classroom practice. UNSDG target 4.7 and the national curriculum in Sweden call for teaching of global justice issues (GJI) in ways that explicitly take-up ethical issues and that support action for structural change. Despite a general policy consensus on the importance of supporting students to deeply consider ethical and political concerns around responsibilities, there is a lack of sustained research about how teachers can engage with ethical issues of systemic inequalities in day-to-day practice in classrooms. An approach informed by decolonial perspectives (Mignolo, 2011; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) provides theoretical and conceptual resources to make visible how educational initiatives can unintentionally reproduce the unequal power relations at the heart of the GJI. Applied pedagogically, researchers suggest decolonial frameworks can support teachers to engage critical perspectives in their framing of and didactic treatment of GJIs (Andreotti, 2014; Stein & Andreotti, 2021). However, introducing critical perspectives that directly address colonial imbalances of power in formal educational contexts also raises tensions between (normative) demands for a break with existing processes sustaining structural inequalities and unsustainable lifestyles on the one hand, and curriculum calls for objectivity and pluralistic participative approaches on the other. Engaging ethically with complex GJI, and unpacking how these are framed, studied, and solved takes time and requires a fundamental rethink of education. How/can decolonial praxis support teachers to navigate the tensions between critical and normative perspectives and a concern with balanced perspectives or plurality of perspectives in the curriculum? Building from the established expertise in pluralistic and decolonial approaches, our new project A decolonial approach to teaching global justice issues (DecoPrax 2022-2026) engages these tensions as pedagogical imperatives. DecoPrax connects teachers’ practice to emerging scholarship informed by decolonial theory in intersections of critical global citizenship and environmental and sustainability education. Working with teachers who are interested in exploring decolonial praxis, our project aim is to explore, design, and co-create with teachers an educational framework informed by decolonial perspectives and rooted in the lived realities of classrooms. Our project will work with a group of 16 upper secondary teachers over three years. We will be engaging the group with workshops on decolonial concepts and pedagogy, visiting classrooms to observe and capture teacher reflections on applying decolonial praxis, and co-developing a resource. In order to set up the workshops and to gain insight into the context of practice, the first stage of the project seeks to identify possibilities and areas of constraints in curriculum and institutional contexts, and this is the focus of our ECER 2023 paper. Specifically, this paper explores: What are teachers’ institutional possibilities and barriers related to taking on a decolonial (critical) approach to GJI?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis first stage of research is in progress having started in September 2022 and to be completed in June 2023. We seek to identify areas of possibility and constraint for decolonial praxis in the teaching of GJIs in curriculum and institutional contexts through two related data sets; curriculum documents (national and local) and focus group interviews. In this paper we focus on the latter. We have conducted four pre-workshop group interviews to identify key characteristics of the institutional contexts in which teachers experience working with GJI and their views on taking a decolonial approach to critical engagement. These focus groups allow informants to explore the subject in dialogue from many angles, capturing key aspects of the complex contexts in which they teach. The conversations generate understandings that are useful to both participants and researchers (Cameron, 2005). All the interviews are audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed, with a specific attention to confrontations between the different discourses in play (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The analysis of the interview data will begin with coding for all instances of key possibilities and tensions which characterise the institutional context within which teachers introduce a critical perspective in curriculum and pedagogy and identifying key aspects. Our analysis of these key aspects will draw on Bryan’s (2022) ‘pedagogy of implicatedness’ as a responsibility framework to promote deeper understanding of the climate crisis in a continuity perspective as we consider these findings in relation to what steps are necessary and in what order might teachers pedagogically engage students with implication. We have begun initial analyses of the data and can share some early findings. Some key findings that are similar and/or unique across the teachers and/or schools relate to the following: curriculum (national level and how taken up in schools/classrooms), institutional culture (school traditions, school leadership, teaching traditions, extra-curricular set-up), student demographics (generational opportunities and challenges), reflexive pedagogy (how pedagogy can be designed to problematise ethical concern), wider findings (relating to the nature of GJIs more broadly). At the conference these findings will be more deeply explicated with examples from the teacher interviews. We will also raise overall key implications of the findings for the next stages of the research (workshops and school visits).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsTeaching GJI presents unique challenges and opportunities. Our participants are teachers who are already committed to and interested in exploring decolonial praxis. We aim to co-create resourcing to support a wider engagement. In focus groups, these teachers see the national curriculum calls for teaching of GJIs as supporting explicitly taking-up ethical issues and including a plurality of perspectives, and promoting action for (structural) change. Thus, the curriculum presents a possibility for radical and critical perspectives. Yet, teachers mention that it is hard to integrate sustainability into an overcrowded subject curriculum. Teachers also indicate constraints from institutional aspects (schools with old traditions) and teaching traditions that work against more critical approaches. Across the sample, they articulate a tough balance between engaging students responsibly with GJI and avoiding doom-and-gloom. These teachers are dealing with students’ emotional responses to (the threat of) climate change and are innovating around this actively. While many students are interested in GJIs, they can disengage when increasingly urgent questions of appropriateness of responsibility become too close or too hard. Teachers are grappling with how to pedagogically engage with responsibility to take action while recognising the need for systemic change and being appropriate to students’ actual sphere of influence. Furthermore, teachers indicate it is easier to teach facts on subject content as criticality and to see different perspectives requires more preparation and takes time though they do find ways. Teachers themselves must have a complex understanding to pedagogically respond to issues students raise in class in relation to the material. The DecoPrax project represents an opportunity to respond to some of these challenges in the next stages of the project and to connect conceptual resources from decolonial theory with the expertise of these teachers.
ReferencesAndreotti, V. (2014). Actionable Curriculum Theory: AAACS 2013 Closing Keynote. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies 10, 1–10.
Bryan, A. (2022). Pedagogy of the implicated: advancing a social ecology of responsibility framework to promote deeper understanding of the climate crisis, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 30:3, 329-348, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2021.1977979
Cameron, J. (2005). Focussing on the Focus Group. In Iain Hay (ed.), Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography (pp. 116–132). Oxford University Press.
Kvale, S. & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews. Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. NY: Sage.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke UP.
Mignolo, W. D. & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decolonialty. Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham: Duke UP.
Stein, S. & Andreotti, V. (2021). Global citizenship otherwise. In E. Bosio (Ed.), Conversations on global citizenship education: Research, teaching and learning (pp. 13-36). Routledge.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (2015). The Paris Agreement.
30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Paper
Envisioning an Alternative Future
Gitte Cecilie Motzfeldt1, Margaretha Häggström2
1Ostfold Univercity Collage, Norway; 2University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Presenting Author: Motzfeldt, Gitte Cecilie;
Häggström, Margaretha
The future is without doubt uncertain and in change. It does not yet exist, but it can be imagined. Children and young people are in the midst of the global crisis. Holden &Linderud (2021) addresses the idea of sustainable development and emphazise that the idea exists as notions in our heads. As humans we cannot physically touch the idea of a just and sustainable world, but we have the opportunity to imagine it, to work together on this idea through joint work on common problems (ibid). Learning how to deal with complex problems requires creativity and compassion, and the ability to imagine a tomorrow (Häggström & Schmidt, 2021). The present turbulent condition impels us to advance pedagogical theories and practices to inspire, encourage and prepare students to become active and engaged participants in future societies. Accordingly, education must be transformative and involve critical-thinking and integrate self-reflection
into the learning process, and embolden students to reflect on their values, behavior, and attitudes (Mezirow, 2000). Such learning involves the social, emotional, cognitive dimensions of a person’s abilities (Illeris, 2014). Transformative learning is hard and laborious, even grueling. Students will therefore be “forced” to challenge their comfort zone such as mainstream thinking and discourses. This comprises the consequences of globalization and related social and environmental problems, changes in human interaction, and how we create knowledge (Wals, Stevenson, Brody, & Dillon, 2013). It has been argued that transformative learning needs to be integrated in education that builds on future literacy (Häggström & Schmidt, 2021). What kind of educational approach and teaching methods may entail creativity, compassion, and abilities to envision an alternative future and at the same time prepare students to engage in transformative learning processes? During our presentation we will discuss a 60 years old cross-curricular approach that may do so.
The purpose of this research is to discuss the role of storytelling in storyline working with sustainability issues. We discuss how future literacy can help develop students' imaginations about a different future through storyline dramaturgy.
- In what ways are the Storyline events enabling education for sustainable development?
- In what way is Futures literacy providing a framework for transformative learning through the Storyline approach?
We have adopted futures literacy as a pedagogical framework, to discuss the interdisciplinary teaching and learning approach Storyline. Futures literacy (FL) as we comprehend it, is about imagining what the future can be, and the role the future plays in what we see and do not see, and in our actions. Anticipation is crucial for imagining, Miller (2018) points out. The form the future takes in the present is anticipation, he claims (Ibid, p. 2). Therefore, FL relies on an individual’s ability to both anticipate and imagine. The abilities to imagine and anticipate are entangled. The ability to fantasize is one of the driving forces to develop FL (Häggström & Schmidt, 2021). Key concepts for imagining different future scenarios are innovation, improvisation, and exploratory approaches. In our study, we will link these concepts to the features of the Storyline approach. We will examine students’ opportunities to discover, invent and construct an alternative world and future. Also, drawing on Liveley, Slocombe,
and Spiers (2021), who argue that FL should utilize the perceptions of narrative to reach its full emancipatory potential, we will examine the role of dramaturgy in a Storyline. Humans understand the world and human’s place in it through narratives and stories, and future scenarios and strategies are narrative fictions (ibid). Through narrative, a higher mode of FL can be achieved. This requires “not only looking at the future but also looking at how we look at the future” (Liveley et al., 2021, p. 8).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedMethodology
We have used a deductive qualitative method, based on a hermeneutic loop. We move between understanding and preunderstanding and between the whole and parts. By reasoning deductively we will test the theory with its four abilitities; envision a future, identify future competances, orchestrait actions and critically examine actions. Then we will analyse the features of the Storyline approach and the future literacy abilities. That is to explore the theory and tests if that theory is valid in a given circumstance. Based on events from three different Storylines we discuss how events can act as fuel that enable the development of students' abilities to imagine a different future working with sustainable development. The three Storylines that are used as cases in this analysis and discussions are “River Delta”, “ Sea City” and World War II. The “River Delta” and the “Sea City” are both here-and-now Storylines developed and carried out among students at primary school teacher training grades 5-10 at Ostfold University College and the Oslo City University, OsloMet. The intention is that the student teachers will be able to adopt a student perspective in order to be able to work with their own Storylines as professional teachers. The “World War II” storyline is an historical Storyline and was created for and used in teaching in secondary school as well as upper secondary education. The description of the events from “River Delta” is supplemented with quotes from students which is taken from a scientific chapter “An Exploration of the “Mimetic Aspects” of Storyline Used as a Creative and Imaginative approach to Teaching and Learning in Teacher Education” (Karlsen, K. H. et al. 2020). These three Storylines contain different perspectives on sustainability which enables us to analyze and develop new understanding on how the dramaturgy is used. In addition, this allows for a critical approach to teaching and learning sustainable development.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsResults
Based on our analysis so far, the Storyline approach offers many opportunities for working towards FL’s demands. Some of our main findings are a) New meaning creation is formed based on sensory experiences and empathy; b) Through the events in the Storyline dramaturgy students can enhance a sense of action competence as well as create hope for a fairer and more sustainable future; c) Being in an imaginary world students are able to distance themselves and gain new perspectives, assess their own ideas and current social discourses, in the light of up-to-date research.
One conclusion we draw is that teachers have a crucial role to play both regarding students’ incentives to be critical, responsible, and to act, and regarding facilitating a Storyline in a fruitful way. For example, students need support as they reflect on the impact of human activity and their own preconceptions. Storyline aims at empowering students, and our study has shed light on student’s opportunities to develop pragmatic competence and form their own opinions. Simultaneously, Storyline has shown to allow for teachers’ exploratory teaching and learning strategies. As a multimodal approach, Storyline paves the way for exploration, interpretation through creative activities e.g. painting, constructing, photographing, filming and dramatizing. These activities have been vehicles for imagining an alternative world and a different future.
ReferencesReferences
Häggström, M., & Schmidt, C. (2021). Futures literacy – To belong, participate and act!
An Educational perspective. Future 132, 1-11.
Holden, E. og Linnerud, K. (2021). Bærekraftig utvikling. En ide om rettferdighet. Universitetsforlaget.
Illeris, K. (2014). Transformative learning and identity. New York: Routledge.
Karlsen, K. H., Motzfeldt, G. C., Pilskog, H. E., Rasmussen, A. K., & Halstvedt, C. B. (2020). An Exploration of the “Mimetic Aspects” of Storyline Used as a Creative and Imaginative Approach to Teaching and Learning in Teacher Education. I K.H. Karlsen & M. Häggström (Red.). Teaching through Stories. Renewing the Scottish Storyline Approach in Teacher Education, 99-123. Münster: Waxmann.
Liveley, G., Slocombe, W., & Spiers, E. (2021). Futures literacy through narrative. Futures, 125, 1–9.
Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult. Core concepts of transformation theory. Learning as transformation. Critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp.
3–33). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Miller, R. (Ed.). (2018). Transforming the future. Anticipation in the 21st century. New York: Routledge.
Wals, A., Stevenson, R., Brody, M., & Dillon, J. (2013). Tentative directions for environmental education research in uncertain times. In R. Stevenson, M. Brody,
J. Dillon, & A. Wals (Eds.), Research on environmental education (pp. 542–547). New York: Routledge.
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