Pluralism in practice – experiences from Swedish evaluation, school development and research

Abstract

In the international policy debate, environmental education and education for sustainable development seem to be moving away from a focus on behavioural modifications to more pluralistic approaches. This article illuminates a Swedish example of a strategic interplay between evaluation, development and research that relates to this shift, involving actors from schools, governmental agencies and researchers. The specific purpose of the research was to analyse and describe teachers' attempts to stimulate a pluralistic meaning‐making process among their students in the context of education for sustainable development. The empirical material consisted of video‐recorded lessons in secondary and upper secondary schools. In the analysis we used a methodological approach based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein's first‐person perspective on language. A concept called ‘epistemological moves’ has been used to clarify the actions that teachers perform in order to guide students in procedures of meaning‐making. The analysis shows that the teachers perform a number of actions that make pluralistic meaning‐making possible: encouraging the students to compare, specify, generalise and test their arguments under different circumstances. The teachers also encouraged the students to examine and evaluate different alternatives and be critical of their own statements. Finally, the findings are related to a perspective of democracy as a form of life.

Keywords:

• education for sustainable development
• pluralism
• democracy
• pragmatism
• meaning‐making

Notes

1. The project was led by Johan Öhman, Örebro University and Leif Östman, Uppsala University.

2. The concept of selective tradition was originally developed by Williams (1973) to underline the fact that a certain approach to knowledge and a certain educational praxis is always selected within the frames of a specific culture. The regular patterns of selective processes that develop over time form a selective tradition. Within curriculum theory, the existence of such patterns in the praxis of different subjects has been highlighted in several historical studies of education (Englund 1986; Goodson 1987; Östman 1995; Fensham 1998). The implication of these studies is that the education pursued in a specific subject is historically variable and infrequently uniform at certain points in time. The selective traditions represent different answers as to what constitutes good teaching in a subject and include different practices with regard to the selection and organisation of the content, as well as the selection of forms and teaching methods.

3. For a more elaborated description of the three traditions see Sandell, Öhman and Östman (2005).

4. HUS is an acronym for Sustainable Development in School and also means ‘house’ in Swedish. The project was led by Johan Öhman, Örebro University and Leif Östman, Uppsala University.

5. The results of the project were published in the book Hållbar utveckling i praktiken [Education for Sustainable Development in Practice] (Öhman and Östman 2004). The book contains a number of examples of how education for sustainable development can be carried out in everyday educational practice. It was distributed to all schools in Sweden and is also available online at: http://www.skolutveckling.se/publikationer.

6. For a methodological discussion about a pragmatic alternative to cognitive approaches see Öhman and Östman (2007).

7. For example, we generally do not have any doubts about the feelings of a friend who says: ‘I'm hungry’. In most cases the meaning is obvious to us because of the particular situation and circumstances. But this does not automatically mean that we always know the ‘inner’ state of other humans. The point is that the relation between mind and reality becomes an empirical question rather than a metaphysical one.

8. This communicative understanding of democracy has strong support in Swedish educational policy declarations. The National Agency for Education's official report on democracy in school declares that:

 Pre‐schools and schools that use deliberative discussions that are characterised by respect, mutuality and a will to understand, to a great extent fulfils society's demands that the activity should be carried out with democratic working methods. Simultaneously, through deliberative discussions pre‐schools and schools can develop children's and young people's communicative abilities, and with that, their democratic competence. Deliberative discussions make it possible for children and young people to develop the ability to form their own, well‐founded standpoints as well as to develop functional relations to others based on democratic values. (Swedish National Agency for Education 2001b, 4, our translation)