30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Paper
More than a School – Anticipatory Competency and Critical Utopian Horizons in Environmental and Sustainability Education
Nadia Raphael Rathje
Aarhus University, Denmark
Presenting Author: Rathje, Nadia Raphael
In education in general, and education for sustainability specifically, the future is always embedded, as education continually has explicit and implicit ideas about which citizens are educated for which future society. Combined with the great need for change and transition that the sustainability challenges require, it may come as a surprise that anticipatory competence is not a major focus in both Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) research and educational practice. Everyone has been taught history, but quite few have been taught visions of the future, strategic foresight or critically utopian horizons (Bengston, 2016).
In my research on the development of ESE primary schools in the welfare state of Denmark, I have asked school management, teachers and students which kind of school they dream of, and what the school of the future should look like in their opinion. Furthermore, I have done future workshops at the school with the school's stakeholders to qualify more collective answers about which school they dream of and can envision. With this material, this paper examines the questions:
Which utopian ideas about school do the stakeholders at three ESE schools have?
Which perspectives provide the answers in relation to working with anticipatory competence and critical utopian horizons in school development and ESE pedagogy?
The concept of utopia in this presentation leans on Ruth Levitas' (Levitas, 2011) broad definition of utopia as "The desire for a different, better way of being" (Levitas, 2011, p. 209) and her emphasis that utopian notions are always contextual and that there is therefore no universal utopia. In continuation of Levitas, it is also interesting to look at Lisa Garforth's work with modern green utopias and how the understanding of utopias also has a critical dimension that has the potential to become transformative and transgressive (Garforth, 2017).
As a framework, the project is also inspired by critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), which explains that by 'critical utopian horizons' is meant social imagination based on everyday experiences and utopian thinking without reducing the importance of a critical perspective (Egmose et al., 2020; Nielsen, 2016; Tofteng & Husted, 2014). Thus, the underlying critical dimensions that lie in a utopian notion and which also lie in the future workshop method used for empirical collection are emphasized.
The utopian ideas about school have perspectives for the development of ESE schools and perspectives in relation to educational work with future ideas. In an ESE perspective, the need for qualification of future imagination as a skill or competence is formulated in several places, not least in UNESCO's ten key competencies for sustainable development: "Anticipatory competence: the abilities to understand and evaluate multiple futures – possible, probable and desirable; to create one's own visions for the future" (UNESCO, 2017, p. 10). Thus, qualifying this is a didactic pedagogical task for the field of ESE.
Another direct pedagogical/didactic education-oriented view of anticipatory imagination can be found in Keri Facer (Facer, 2018), who criticizes future imagination in education for either thinking too rationally and without imagination, thereby embedding today's hopes and worries too concretely, or with too nearly- excessive hopes for education to solve all the problems of the future and thereby displace uncertainties (Facer, 2018). Facer argues that the understanding of future imagination in education must rest on a pedagogy of today, which understands itself as an ecotone, i.e., an ecologically fertile intermediate zone between past and future. Facer argues that school should not be a preparation for "known futures", but a space of opportunity and a laboratory for new opportunities and new futures.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe study is a part of a PhD project and is a multiple-case study in which I investigate three Danish schools that have worked with ESE for more than five years and see ESE as their most important development project. The schools are viewed in an ESE whole-school perspective (Hargreaves, 2008; Mathar, 2015), which means that the schools and their stakeholders are seen in a systemic perspective (Sterling, 2003). The empirical material for this paper consists of semi-structured interviews with school management (13 interviews), teachers (8 interviews) and students (6 focus group interviews). Moreover, the data material consists of future workshops reports (Egmose et al., 2020), three workshops with various adult participants from the schools and three workshops with students.
The study has an abductive approach where theory and empirical analysis continuously fertilize each other (Shank, 2008). The basic theoretical starting point for the PhD project and thus also for this paper's analysis is practice theory (Schatzki, 2001). This means that the focus is on social practices (rather than on individuals and/or structures) and that action patterns are understood as both bodily, cognitive and communicative. The social practices have certain routinized notions on a collective level, which means that, e.g., underlying collective understandings of what school is and can do have an influence on how the participants can develop utopian ideas about school. In continuation of this, with Levitas’s concept of utopia (Levitas, 2011) and Garforth's study of modern green utopias (Garforth, 2017), the analysis examines how the participants' utopian ideas can be understood in the context of ESE school development.
This paper explores the discrepancy between the expressed need for change and transition and a simultaneous lack of focus on understanding and developing anticipatory competence and critical utopian horizons. In continuation of this, the paper asks whether the participants' preliminary answers to future ideas about school can fertilize or point to pedagogical, didactic schisms and development opportunities if anticipatory competence must become a more important part of the ESE field.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe participants in the study largely point to the future as an essential aspect when they have to justify the work with sustainable development in the school. Asked what a utopian notion of a sustainable school might look like, participants' responses initially point to overcoming or eradicating structural obstacles such as lack of time and lack of space to experiment and decide for themselves, but it is clearly difficult for participants to think beyond the current structural framework. At the same time, and in contrast to this, these same people are concerned with sustainable development, experience a strong need for development, transformation and transition, and have high hopes for how education can help solve the enormous environmental crises (climate, pollution and biodiversity) and the social and economic challenges we and the planet face. When the participants are encouraged to think bigger and further, some of the most important tendencies in the answers are that the school should not be a secluded place, but part of a local community where school and everyday life merge to a greater extent in, e.g., forms of apprenticeship. This relates to notions about openness, a closer relationship with nature and the school as an open community that also provides space for the individual's choice, as well as for risk-taking and action. In the future workshops, the participants conclude in different ways that what they want is "more than a school". The answers partly point back to the participating schools' ongoing work and challenges in creating a sustainable profile, but may at the same time be linked to and fertilize possible schisms and opportunities where the ESE field can contribute to developing and strengthening the focus on critically utopian horizons and a sustainability pedagogy and didactics that take anticipatory future competence development seriously.
ReferencesBengston, D. N. (2016). Ten principles for thinking about the future: a primer for environmental professionals. https://dx.doi.org/10.2737/nrs-gtr-175
Egmose, J., Gleerup, J., & Nielsen, B. S. (2020). Critical Utopian Action Research: Methodological Inspiration for Democratization? International Review of Qualitative Research, 13(2), 233-246. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720933236
Facer, K. (2018). Governing Education Through The Future. In (pp. 197-210). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97019-6_10
Garforth, L. (2017). Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and after Nature. Polity Press.
Hargreaves, L. G. (2008). The whole-school approach to eduation for sustainable development: From pilot projects to systemic change. Policy & practice (Centre for Global Education), 6, 69-74.
Levitas, R. (2011). The concept of Utopia ([Student / with a new preface by the author]. ed.). Peter Lang.
Mathar, R. (2015). A Whole School Approach to Sustainable Development: Elements of Education for Sustainable Development and Students’ Competencies for Sustainable Development. In (pp. 15-30). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09549-3_2
Nielsen, B. S. N. K. A. (2016). Critical Utopian Action Research: The Potentials of Action Research in the Democratisation of Society. In Commons, Sustainability, Democratization (pp. 90-120). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647951-13
Schatzki, T. R. (2001). Practice theory. In K. K.-C. E. v. S. T. R. Schatzki (Ed.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 10–23). Routledge.
Shank, G. (2008). Abductive strategies in educational research. The American Journal of Semiotics, 5(2), 275-290.
Sterling, S. (2003). Whole System Thinking as a Basis for Paradigm Change in Education. Explorations in the Context of Sustainability. University of Bath.]. Bath.
Tofteng, D., & Husted, M. (2014). Critical Utopian Action Research. In (Vol. 1, pp. 230-232).
UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals - Learning Objectives. Paris, France: UNESCO Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444/PDF/247444eng.pdf.multi
30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Paper
Building Sustainable Futures Though Research and Education - Foundational ES/ESE Imagery Diversity in Peer-Reviewed Educational Research Literature
Birte Reichstein
Umeå University, Sweden
Presenting Author: Reichstein, Birte
In Western countries, citizens spend a significant part of their life embedded in an educational system. Educational systems present facts and structures explicitly by WHAT is taught and assessed, and implicitly by HOW it is taught and assessed. Hence, education affects citizens’ perceptions of societal values in terms of both knowledge and behavior. Consequently, education can be expected to have homogenizing effects on citizens. Depending on WHAT and HOW we teach and assess, diversity in knowledge, values, and attitudes can either be acknowledged and embraced, or silenced and rejected.
In times of sustainability crisis, education has been identified as a key component to solve environmental and sustainability challenges. Education for Sustainability (ES) and Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) acknowledge educational systems’ potential to prepare citizens, and aim at fostering responsible citizens that act for sustainable futures (Eilks et al., 2019; Niebert, 2018). To pursue sustainability - the mitigation of environmental impact to ensure the prevailing of a viable and livable planet Earth for all living organisms (human and non-human) - demands radical societal change in Western countries. Economies and lifestyles must be adjusted (Niebert, 2019, and this in ways that decenter us humans to make room for more relational approaches to planet earth and its inhabitants (UNESCO, 2021). For this adjustment of economies and lifestyles, citizens must perceive change and diverse views as valued in society. Educational systems must ensure not to reproduce, but to reconstruct, societies to enable transformation (Wals, 2022). Students and teachers must be invited to contribute to the diversity of solutions as knowledge producers rather than being presented with homogenizing one-fits-all solutions.
I intend to stimulate awareness of and attentiveness to diverse views on sustainability in educational research. My focus concerns the diversity of applications and understandings of the concepts, ES and ESE, in peer reviewed educational research literature. A diversity with spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions, and a concept with economical, ecological, and social dimensions. In Western countries, tensions between the economic dimension, and the ecological and societal dimensions have far-reaching consequences, not least on which views are amplified and which may be muffled. While economic forces ask for effectivization, ecological and social dimensions demand a slowdown of economy. A slowing down necessary to discover and explore alternative paths in a complex world. A complexity that must not be simplified for the sake of effectivization, but that should be embraced to explore diverse routes to sustainable futures (UNESCO 2021). Hence, I explore how the economically-dependent research machinery (cf., Savat & Thompson, 2015) affects the pace of ES/ESE research, and thereby our openness for true change in the worst-case causing diversity loss in ES/ ESE discourse. An unintended loss of alternative views that could cloud our judgement of how to act towards sustainability.
With my critical analysis of the ES/ESE discourse in the peer-reviewed literature, I intend to further stimulate discussions regarding educational systems’ purpose and ability to prepare students for our journey towards sustainability. A matured discourse that has and still tends to evolve around dichotomies like instrumental - emancipatory (e.g., Wals, 2011), alternatively qualification – citizenship (e.g. (Bauer, 2003; Hansen & Phelan, 2019; Willbergh, 2015). Human-centered dichotomies questioned by researchers that take more critical posthuman perspectives on ES/ESE (e.g. Lysgaard 2019). Recently, the diversity of perspectives on ES/ESE has taken a leap. This development led me to ask the following questions:
What strands of ES/ESE discourse are represented in western peer-reviewed educational research literature? How does ES/ESE research utilize these diverse views, are there tensions or co-actions?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo answer my research questions, I apply a critical discourse analytical perspective on sustainability problems’ representations in research literature concerning ES. My analytical methodology is inspired by Carol Bacchi’s (2009) “What is the problem represented to be?” (WPR)-approach, an approach developed for policy texts, but equally applicable to other text types dealing with problem identification and solution proposals. The WPR-approach is inspired by Foucault, and aims to make visible the unsaid, the presupposed, the assumed, the silenced, the historical and cultural influences, the taken-for granted, and unintended effects (Bacchi, 2010).
To keep the study feasible, I chose to limit data collection culturally to the Western countries and to the last 10 -15 years. Even with this scope, the volume of publications dealing with ES/ESE is still immense. Therefore, I use a 3-step selection method to limit the number of publications for analysis: (1) database literature search followed by machine language learning assisted relevance check using ASReview (van de Schoot et al., 2021), (2) citation network analysis using the bibliometric tool Bibliometrix (Aria & Cuccurullo,2017) to analyze co-author, co-citation, and term-co-occurrence networks, and (3) argumentative zoning (Teufel, 1999).
Steps 2 & 3 allow me to identify clusters to draw random samples for the critical discourse analysis on publications’ introduction and discussion sections. This methodology enables me to identify and validate clusters representing the ES/ESE discourse. To identify differences in discourse within and between co-author/co-citation clusters, I use term-co-occurrence to compare the use of ES/ESE specific terms. Overlap between term-co-occurrence clusters and co-author/citation clusters indicate similarity in term use. Non-overlapping discourse clusters, then, represent different ES/ESE constructs indicating a potential for homogenization within isolated clusters.
Argumentative zoning uses machine language learning to label text sections according to whether the argument made is neutral, affirmative, or contradictory. This method can confirm clusters’ distinctions and relations. Publications assigned to the same cluster should be either found in affirmative or neutral zones, while publications assigned to different cluster should be in contradictory or neutral zones, if cited in a different cluster.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsI expect the analysis to reveal diverse strands of ES/ESE imageries represented by different clusters. Here, the WPR-approach enables me not only to depict imageries that are in the spotlight, but also to lighten up those imageries’ twilight zones that are constituted of the usually unintendedly taken-for-granted or silenced imageries. My aim is to show the diverse applications and understandings of the concept sustainability that frame Western ES/ESE research. Research that will have implications for what and how sustainability issues are presented in our schools and universities, because it is this research that informs national and international education policies.
As educational researchers, we provide society not only with knowledge but we are societies’ critical friends. Being a researcher means taking responsibility for society, and demands a self-reflective practice to be aware of your own assumptions, biases, and what we take for granted. I see my analysis of ES/ESE imageries in Western educational research as my contribution to self-reflection on the research-community level. I expect to find several ES/ESE imageries which will overlap to varying degrees. In other words, diverse ways of imagining ES/ESE and futures to create that are a necessary but not sufficient foundation to build sustainable futures upon. Not sufficient because for a foundation to support what is built sustainably, the foundation has to be utilized in a robust manner. How the foundation is utilized is what argumentative zoning and citation network analysis help me to unravel.
Overall, I intend to map the complex Western ES/ESE research landscape by putting together the different ES/ESE imageries how they relate to each other, and where tensions and co-action occur. A map that can help us orient ourselves in a complex landscape ES/ESE of discourse and to stimulate co-actions.
ReferencesAria, M., & Cuccurullo, C. (2017). bibliometrix : An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis. Journal of Informetrics, 11(4), 959-975.
Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented To Be? Pearson Education.
Bacchi, C. (2010). Foucault, Policy and Rule Challenging the Problem-Solving Paradigm. FREIA's tekstserie(74).
Bauer, W. (2003). On the Relevance of Bildung for Democracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(2).
Eilks, I., Sjöström, J., & Mahaffy, P. (2019). Science and technology education for society and sustainability. In B. Akpan (Ed.), Science Education: Visions of the Future (pp. 321–334). Next Generation Education.
Hansen, D. R., & Phelan, A. M. (2019). Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education. Research in Education, 103(1), 34–48.
Lysgaard, J. A. (2019). Dark Pedagogy Between Denial and Insanity. In J. A. Lysgaard, S. Bengtsson, & M. Laugesen (Eds.), Dark Pedagogy. Education, Horror, and the Anthropocene (pp. 87-102). Palgrave Macmillan.
Niebert, K. (2018). Science Education in the Anthropocene. Building Bridges across Disciplines for Transformative Education and a Sustainable Future, January, 28359.
Niebert, K. (2019). Effective Sustainability Education Is Political Education. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 2(4).
Savat, D., & Thompson, G. (2015). Education and the Relation to the Outside: A Little Real Reality. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 273-300.
Teufel, S. (1999). Argumentative Zoning: Information Extraction from Scientific Text [PhD, University of Edinburgh].
UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining Our Futures Together. A new social contract for education. UNESCO.
van de Schoot, R., et al. (2021). An open source machine learning framework for efficient and transparent systematic reviews. Nature Machine Intelligence, 3(2), 125-133.
Wals, A. E. J. (2011). Learning Our Way to Sustainability. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 5(2), 177–186.
Wals, A. (2022). Transgressive Learning Resistance Pedagogy. In New Visions for Higher Education towards 2030Higher Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi). www.guni-call4action.org
Willbergh, I. (2015). The problems of ‘competence’ and alternatives from the Scandinavian perspective of Bildung. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47(3), 334–354.
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