Conference Agenda

This symposium is the result of a collaboration in the context of an international scientific network on ‘Sustainability Didactics’ (SUDI). The network brings together researchers from universities in Belgium, Sweden, Germany, and Austria with the aim to facilitate and strengthen didactical research on teaching and learning about socio-ecological issues. Over the past decades, environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research has provided us with increased insight in specific didactical challenges involved. We also gained knowledge about what is, in general, important for fruitful teaching practices and learning processes in this area. However, insight into what it implies to realise these important, general principles in practice – i.e., what kind of ‘didactical work’ of educators it requires – is much scarcer. The SUDI-network wants to inspire and inform such research by bringing diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical didactical perspectives into dialogue. In this symposium, we do so with a focus on teaching and learning about controversial socio-ecological issues. This topic, as well as the focus of the six presented papers, are relevant to, both, ESE research and research on citizenship education. Therefore, we propose a two-part symposium as joint sessions within the respective EERA-networks (NW30 and NW34).

Adequate ways to address the controversy that often characterises socio-ecological issues is elaborately discussed in educational research literature. Teaching about controversial topics is challenging and teachers have found to be reluctant to engage with controversy associated with socio-ecological issues (e.g., Seow & Ho 2016; Anderson & Jacobson 2018; Waldron et al. 2019; Alkaher & Carmi 2024; Bengtsson et al. 2024; Breitenmoser et al. 2025). There are varied reasons for that such as, among others, teachers’ fear that the content might be experienced as controversial by students, doubts about students’ ability to understand and discuss the issue, fear of being perceived as political and whether this is appropriate as a teacher, avoidance to impose norms and attitudes and intentions to be neutral, avoidance to engage with emotions, insecurity, and conflicts, absence of controversy in curricula, etc. Besides risks, also the educative potential of engaging with controversy in the classroom is recognised in previous research (e.g., Van Poeck et al. 2019; Chan 2023; Bengtsson et al. 2024; Strijbos & Engels 2024). Addressing controversial socio-ecological issues can, for example, stimulate ethical and political learning, elicit concern and emotions as key drivers for learning, contribute to fostering pluralistic and democratic citizenship, disrupt familiar patterns of thinking, provoke self-reflection and critical analysis, and encourage pupils to reconsider current, perspectives or practices, etc. This symposium brings into dialogue diverse theoretical contributions, methodological approaches, and empirical research findings aimed at deepening our insight into how the didactical challenges of teaching about controversial socio-ecological issues can be handled in ways that are fruitful to unlock the educative potential of engaging with such content. Doing so, we hope to nourish a discussion about how educational research can generate useful knowledge that provides navigational support for educational professionals facing this challenging task.

After a theoretical and two empirical contributions to the first part of this symposium, Part II presents and discusses 3 papers that share a focus on teachers. Paper 1 links research on established teaching traditions and ways of teaching about controversial sustainability issues shared by groups of Swedish teachers to concrete actions (teacher moves) in the classroom. Paper 2 focuses on the attitudes of German lecturers when dealing with controversial issues in university teaching and discusses implications for professional development. Paper 3 explores the vital role of teachers’ didactical work in a case study of classroom discussions about controversial socio-ecological issues between Belgian engineering students.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the relation between culturally shared traditions of teaching, so called ‘teaching traditions’, about controversial sustainability issues and teachers’ concrete actions in the classroom. The starting point is a quantitative study using a questionnaire directed to Swedish junior high-school teachers (Ojala et al., 2025). The study explored whether, and how, different teaching traditions are associated with various concrete teaching practices, so called ‘ways of teaching’ or ‘manners of teaching’ (Lundqvist et al., 2012), regarding controversial sustainability issues. While teaching traditions concern highly generalised pattern of values and interest regarding teaching that can be found stable over time, ways of teaching concern patterns that refer to concrete teaching practices shared by groups of teachers. Examples of the latter are encouraging rational reflection, encouraging emotional awareness, encouraging an oppositional stance, encouraging perspective-taking, or encouraging students to act sustainably. Four traditions where found: a fact-based - against values tradition; a fact-based science orientation tradition; a normative tradition and a pluralistic tradition. These traditions relate differently to a set of manners of teaching that was investigated. In this presentation I will relate these findings to analyses of teachers’ interventions in the classroom, so called Teacher Moves (Östman et al., 2019). By doing so it is possible to show how concrete actions (moves) of the teacher produce not only different manners of teaching, but also how they align (or not) with existing teaching traditions. This is not done to go against the idea that teaching always has a unique dimension. Rather, it is a way to create an understanding of how unique teachers are part of producing and re-producing collectively and culturally shared practices and values by their way of interacting with students. In the discussion I will address two issues. The first issue concerns how to understand the process of (re)producing teaching traditions as well as how to think of the role of traditions for the actual teaching of teachers. Here, I use work by sociologists, for example Chris Shilling (2008), but also earlier work on teaching traditions, for example Öhman & Östman (2019). The second issue concerns the more concrete didactical questions of why and how to teach about controversial sustainability issues in relation to the concepts of Bildung and subjectification.

Lundqvist, E., Almqvist, J. & Östman, L. (2012). Institutional Traditions in Teachers’ Manners of Teaching. Cultural Studies of Science Education 7 (1): 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11422-011-9375-x. Öhman, J. & Östman, L. (2019). Different Teaching Traditions in Environmental and Sustainability Education. In Sustainable Development Teaching: Ethical and Political Challenges, edited by K. Van Poeck, L. Östman, & J. Öhman, 70–82. London: Routledge. Östman, L., Van Poeck, K. & Öhman, J. (2019). A Transactional Theory on Sustainability Teaching: Teacher Moves. In Sustainable Development Teaching: Ethical and Political Challenges, edited by K. Van Poeck, L. Östman, and J. Öhman, 140–152. New York: Routledge. Ojala, M., Östman, L., Van Poeck, K., Bengtsson, S., Håkansson, M., & Hansson, P. (2025). Teaching controversial sustainability issues at the junior high-school level: an explorative study of teaching traditions and associations with ways of teaching. Environmental Education Research, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2025.2538031 Shilling, C. (2008). Changing Bodies. Habit, Crisis and Creativity. Sage Press.

Despite long-standing discussions about critical thinking and pluralistic perspectives in the ESE debate (e.g. Tryggvason et al. 2023), controversy has become a hot topic in recent years (Kindlinger/Hahn-Laudenberg 2025). While dealing with conflicting aims is essential to sustainability issues, the social debate on socio-ecological transformation processes is changing (e.g. Eversberg et al. 2024). Especially in times of social polarization and increasingly anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and discriminatory positions, which are also finding their way into schools, it is crucial that teachers deal professionally with (the limits of) controversy. In civic education, various criteria have been developed (Hand 2008, Hess/McAvoy 2015) and updated (Kauppi/Drerup 2021) to identify controversial debates, which may also serve as inspiration for ESE. Nevertheless, there is an enormous need at universities to equip prospective teachers with the knowledge and competencies to deal with controversies professionally while at the same time pursuing a normative framework for sustainable development (Pettig/Singer-Brodowski 2025). The paper examines the attitudes of university lecturers when dealing with controversial debates and values in university teaching. In a first step, we differentiate between the debate on how to deal appropriately with controversy in schools and universities. While the educational theory debate on how to deal with controversial topics often refers to teaching in schools (Drerup 2021), the discussion on controversy in the university context is even more strongly influenced by considerations of scientific theory. In a second step, we present findings from an exploratory, quantitative study with university educators (n = 91) from different disciplines, half of them being involved in teacher education. The questionnaire contained questions on self-assessed knowledge on (E)SD, general statements on higher education, controversy and values, as well as the importance of specific tasks of university educators and possible effects of university teaching. The data was analysed using SPSS 31.0.0.0.0, including descriptive and non-parametric tests. The results indicate that overall, university educators consider controversial topics an important part of their university teaching, yet practical implementation in their courses is limited. Educators involved in teacher training agree more strongly that they disclose their own value orientations in their teaching and that their task is to promote critical thinking among their students. Moreover, they report a higher knowledge of ESD both for themselves and for colleagues in their respective subjects. The results are discussed in the light of implications for professional training both for university educators involved in teacher training and for those who are not.

Drerup, Johannes (2021): Kontroverse Themen im Unterricht. Konstruktiv streiten lernen. Stuttgart: Reclam (Bildung und Unterricht). Eversberg, Dennis; Fritz, Martin; Faber, Linda von; Schmelzer, Matthias (2024): The new socio-ecological class conflict: conflicting mentalities and interests in the dispute over transformation ; research report of the Junior Research Group „Mentalities in flux: imaginaries and social structure in modern circular bio-based societies (flumen)“: Friedrich-Schiller-University, Institute for Sociology. Hand, Michael (2008): What should we teach as controversial? A defense of the epistemic criterion. In: Educational Theory 58 (2), S. 213–228. Kauppi, Veli-Mikko; Drerup, Johannes (2021): Discussion and inquiry: A Deweyan perspective on teaching controversial issues. In: Theory and Research in Education 19 (3), S. 213–234. Kindlinger, Marcus; Hahn-Laudenberg, Katrin (2025): Teaching about teaching controversial issues: Insights from two teacher education courses on controversial issues across school subjects. In: Education, Citizenship and Social, Artikel 17461979251356895. Pettig, Fabian; Singer-Brodowski, Mandy (2025): Learning in Relation with a Changing World: Thinking Beyond ESD 1 and ESD 2 Towards ESD 3. In: Journal of Education for Sustainable, Artikel 09734082251347383. Tryggvason, Ásgeir; Öhman, Johan; van Poeck, Katrien (2023): Pluralistic environmental and sustainability education – a scholarly review. In: Environmental Education Research, S. 1–26.

This paper presents a case study of classroom discussions between engineering students in a Belgian university. They engage with the question how technologies play a role in transitioning towards a more sustainable world. The teachers explicitly strive to move beyond a technical focus by also attending to the economic, political, ethical, cultural… dimensions of the issues addressed. They aim to increase students’ capabilities to engage, as future engineers and as citizens, in high-quality argumentation about these topics and the controversies involved. The paper (1) presents and illustrates a research methodology that allows to gain detailed insight into the role of teachers’ didactical work on students’ learning through argumentative discussions on controversial socio-ecological topics, and (2) discusses how findings of such didactical research can inspire collaboration between researchers and teachers in the pursuit of overcoming teaching challenges. The empirical analysis starts with Transactional Argumentation Analysis (TAA) of students’ discussions. TAA has been used in previous didactical research (e.g., Rudsberg et al. 2013, 2015, 2017) and is well-suited to investigate discussions on controversial topics. It combines Practical Epistemology Analysis (Wickman & Östman 2002) to analyse students’ ongoing meaning-making with an analysis of Toulmin’s (1958) Argument Patterns to assess the quality of their argumentation. The analyses show that this quality varies greatly depending on the content of the discussion. Students are noticeably more successful at developing strong arguments about technical issues than about non-technical matters. Then, the analysis links students’ learning to the teachers’ didactical choices and interventions. Using the Dramaturgy of Teaching (Van Poeck et al. 2024) as an analytical model, the study reveals the influence of teachers’ preparatory work of ‘scripting’ and ‘staging’ the educational environment, as well as of their ‘teacher moves’ (Östman et al. 2019) during the ‘performance’ of the lessons. Decisive aspects of the preparatory scripting and staging are identified and relate to, both, the content offered and the organisation of the setting. Furthermore, it is shown how, at those instances where preparatory scripting and staging fails to realise the teaching purposes, well-considered interventions ad hoc during the performance can remediate the situation. Lesson Design Workshops (Östman et al. 2025) with the teachers following the case study resulted in a tailored assessment rubric used for evaluating students’ performance, a guide for facilitating classroom discussions, a re-design of the course (assignment, course content, teaching materials), and a curriculum reform of the Bachelor programme.

Östman, L., Van Poeck, K. & Öhman, J. (2019), ‘A transactional theory on sustainability teaching: Teacher moves’, in K. Van Poeck, L. Östman and J. Öhman (eds.) Sustainable Development Teaching: Ethical and Political Challenges, 140-52, New York: Routledge. Östman, L., Van Poeck, K., Lidar, M. & Lundqvist, E. (2025). Theory-practice bridging through lesson design workshops. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1–16. Rudsberg, K., Öhman, J. & Östman, L. (2013). Analyzing Students’ Learning in Classroom Discussions about Socioscientific Issues. Science Education, 97(4): 594-620. Rudsberg, K. & Öhman, J. (2015). The role of knowledge in participatory and pluralistic approaches to ESE. Environmental Education Research, 21(7): 955-974. Rudsberg, K., Östman, L. & Aaro Östman, E. (2017). Students’ meaning making in classroom discussions: the importance of peer interaction. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 12(3): 709-738. Toulmin, S.E. (1958). The uses of argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. Van Poeck, K., Vandenplas, E. & Östman, L. (2024). Teaching action-oriented knowledge on sustainability issues, Environmental Education Research, 30(3): 334-360. Wickman, P.O. & Östman, L. (2002). Learning as Discourse Change: A Sociocultural Mechanism. Science Education, 86(5): 601–623.