Teaching action-oriented knowledge on sustainability issues

Abstract

Knowledge about sustainability problems as it is typically taught does not per se lead to action for tackling these problems. Environmental and sustainability education researchers have argued for teaching more action-oriented knowledge. This article addresses the ‘didactical work’ required for teachers to do so, both in preparing and implementing lessons. The authors employ transactional didactic theory and the analytical method Practical Epistemology Analysis to open-up the black box of teaching and learning action-oriented knowledge on sustainability issues. The methodology, that has a strong focus on classroom observations, allows to empirically investigate the influence of teachers’ actions on students’ learning. It is here applied to a case study in higher education where it is engineering teachers’ explicit ambition for their students to explore and develop a wider area of knowledge about sustainability issues. Our findings shed light on what this requires in terms of the ‘scripting’, ‘staging’, and ‘performance’ of lessons.

Keywords:

• Sustainability education
• teaching
• knowledge
• action
• engineering
• Dewey

Acknowledgements

We owe great thanks to the teachers who allowed us to observe their teaching practices and invested time and commitment in discussing these during interviews and focus groups. Furthermore, we thank our colleagues in our joint research environment TEPLAB (Laboratory for Teaching Practices) as well as four anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We want to emphasise that these pursued outcomes should not be understood as being limited to prespecified ways of thinking or acting (e.g. factual knowledge, a correct way of understanding something). On the contrary, they can be as ‘open-ended’ as for example forming a personal opinion about something, creatively creating new practices, etc. Even in the latter case, however, teaching requires careful and well-considered planning and steering in the pursuit of helping the students achieve these aims.

2 Connecting didactic theory to dramaturgical frameworks in fact aligns well with the etymology of the word didactics (Didaktik) which stems from the Classical Greek group of words connected to ‘didaskein’ (didaktikos, didaskalia, didache, etc.) which means ‘teaching’, ‘showing something’, but also ‘playing out a drama’ (Hoppman 2007).

3 Following Ghent University’s ‘ethics decision tree’, our study did not meet the criteria for being ‘ethically sensitive’ (e.g. no work with human body materials, animals, medical data, potentially harmful research activities, minors) and therefore did not require ethics approval by an ethics committee.

4 They developed this assignment in the context of an education innovation project at their university and were thereby largely inspired by an assignment developed by Thomas Block and Erik Paredis at Ghent University’s Centre for Sustainable Development (Block, Paredis, and Van Poeck 2019).

5 Here we present and discuss excerpts of the conversations. In order to offer transparency about the analysis and illustrate it in detail, the Appendix presents a table on the PEA and TMA that includes an overview of the identified gaps and created relations, the effect on privileging as well as the identified teacher moves.

6 This is a decision from the government to stop using open space as building land by 2040.

7 Student evaluations in the university where we conducted our study, reveal that Jensen’s observation in the early 2000s to a certain extent still holds true – although there are obviously also counter-examples. At the end of the Bachelor programmes, 76,1% of the students indicates that their education has “encouraged them to think about societal challenges” while only 56,9% states that it “taught them to think about ecologically sustainable and/or socially just solutions for problems”. 19,6% (strongly) disagreed with the latter statement. After the Master programmes, respectively 70,1% and 54,1% agreed with the two statements. (source: https://ugiprd.ugent.be/)

Additional information

Funding

The authors’ work on this article has been made possible thanks to projects funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie [grant agreement No 843437], by Formas [grant No 2018-01427] and by the Flemish government’s Ministry of Education and Training.

Notes on contributors

Katrien Van Poeck

Katrien Van Poeck is associate professor at Ghent University’s department of Political Sciences. She coordinates the Centre for Sustainable Development’s research line on sustainability education. Theoretically, her work has been largely inspired by pragmatist didactic theory. Methodologically and empirically, she builds on transactional analytical frameworks. She leads research projects on facilitating learning in the context of sustainability transitions, sustainability teaching in higher education, and challenge-based teaching on real-world sustainability problems. Katrien has a special interest in the relation between sustainability education research and practice and engages in initiatives to foster the co-creation of better sustainability education in collaborative settings with researchers and practitioners. She is also part-time affiliated to Uppsala University (Sweden) and is a co-founder of the research group TePlab - The Laboratory for Teaching Practices.

Ellen Vandenplas

Ellen Vandenplas holds a Master degree in Educational Sciences. Since 2017, Ellen supports courses and faculties at Ghent University in integrating sustainability in education. Since august 2019 she is affiliated as a doctoral researcher at Ghent University’s department of Political Sciences. Her PhD focuses on climate change education and the question on how to ‘see’ and ‘handle’ existential concerns of students in view of climate change. Moreover she is interested in learning for sustainable development (ESD) and always searching to what extent ESD can ‘grow’ and ‘flourish’ in the education practice of a university and be ‘significant’ at the same time.

Leif Östman

Leif Östman is professor of curriculum studies at Uppsala University. He is the director and one of the founders of the research group TePlab - The Laboratory for Teaching Practices. In his research in science education and environmental and sustainability education he has developed theoretical models and analytical methods based on pragmatist philosophy and the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has a background as a science teacher in a lower secondary school. Since 1987 he has been involved in teacher training as well as different forms of cooperation with teachers, schools, NGOs and governmental departments in Sweden and internationally.