Education for sustainable development and normativity: a transactional analysis of moral meaning‐making and companion meanings in classroom communication

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to present and illustrate two different ways of analysing the normativity and discursivity of classroom communication during education for sustainable development (ESD). The two types of analysis can provide important knowledge for discussions of ESD in relation to morals and democracy. Both methods are based on pragmatism and the later works of Wittgenstein. The first approach was developed to examine the relationship between cultural and psychological processes in environmental ethical meaning‐making. It draws on the endeavours of sociocultural research and cultural psychology to take the individual into account, or in other words, the intra‐personal dimension of meaning‐making, which is not usually the case in the analysis of ESD. The second method relates to the normativity of ESD. Dewey refers to the apparently implicit socialisation taking place during education as ‘collateral learning’. We refer to the content included in subsidiary forms of learning as companion meaning, which either follows on automatically when teaching knowledge content, or becomes collateral learning when one learns scientific meanings. Such meanings can, for example, be concerned with the nature of knowledge and people's relations to nature.

Keywords:

• ethics
• transaction
• companion meeting
• classroom communication
• education for sustainable development
• environmental education

Notes

1. Examples of internationally well‐known researchers in this tradition are Ference Marton and Roger Säljö.

2. Examples of internationally well‐known researchers in this tradition are Ulf P. Lundgren and Tomas Englund.

3. See Lave (1996, 7) for a discussion of similar problems.

4. See also Lave (1996, 5), who makes a similar point.

5. Discursive psychology has the same point of departure (Edwards 1997, 48).

6. It is important to note that this methodological advice does not imply a psychological interpretation of intention. Instead we use the transactional approach illustrated by Wittgenstein as the following:

 An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question. (Wittgenstein 1953/2001, 337)

7. It can actually be shown, as Wickman and Östman (2002a) do, that in order to learn – or become part of a discourse – it is necessary that students get help from authoritative resources like a teacher or a textbook. Pure induction in a philosophical sense does not work in learning situations.

8. It is possible to analyse the role of artefacts in human meaning‐making without taking an essentialist stance on the nature of artefacts, since in a transactional approach the proper focus of analyses is not the interaction between humans and artefacts – something that Bentley and Dewey (1949/1991) observed as easily lending itself to a deterministic way of thinking – but the use of technology in meaning‐making on the one hand and the intrapersonal, interpersonal and institutional circumstances of this meaning‐making on the other (Almqvist and Östman 2006). The approach on artefacts is the same as the way Wittgenstein approaches language: as something in use in specific circumstances.