Creating space for ‘the political’ in environmental and sustainability education practice: a Political Move Analysis of educators’ actions

Abstract

Literature about education’s role in realising a more sustainable world emphasises the importance of acknowledging democratic and political challenges in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). This article offers an empirically grounded theoretical and methodological contribution to future research on how ‘the political’ is introduced, handled and experienced in ESE practice. It presents an analytical method, ‘Political Move Analysis’, for investigating how educators’ actions open-up or close down a space for the political in learners’ meaning-making. The method has been developed through empirical case studies that allowed to identify a variety of ‘politicising’ and ‘de-politicising moves’ performed by educators. Through these moves, educators can engage in very diverse teaching practices which differently affect the direction of people’s meaning-making. These findings are theoretically discussed in view of how to understand the entanglement of the educative and the political in ESE. Prospects for future research and for inspiring teaching practice are pointed out.

Keywords:

• Environmental and sustainability education
• ecological footprint
• community supported agriculture
• the political
• transaction
• Epistemological Move Analysis
• Political Move Analysis

Notes

1. It is also possible to conduct a PMA of learners’ interventions (e.g. in classroom discussions, deliberation and argumentation activities), but here we focus on educators’ interventions.

2. An environmental education centre, an organisation that offers workshops for ecological behaviour change for adults, a regional centre for action, culture and youth, the project ‘Environmental Performance at School’, the ‘Transition Towns Network’ in Flanders, a ‘transition arena’ aiming to make a city climate neutral and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm.

3. This does not mean, however, that only politicising moves were detected in the first case and only de-politicising moves in the second. On the contrary, our analysis also revealed some de-politicising moves (e.g. rationalising moves) on the part of the CSA-farmer. It would thus be a far too simplistic conclusion to characterise the studied practices as either homogeneously politicising or de-politicising (see also below: Section 4.3). Yet, our choice to illustrate our findings that way is driven by a concern for clearly presenting and demonstrating the PMA method.

4. The ecological footprint is a standardised measure of human demand on nature representing the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population and to assimilate associated waste (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint).

5. As our analysis shows, practical manifestations of the theoretical concept of ‘schooling’ are not necessarily limited to formal education in schools: here, we saw how a schooling practice took shape in a non-formal learning setting. All the same, it is possible to observe and characterise particular formal education practices in schools as ‘education’ instead of ‘schooling’.