Didactical dilemmas when planning teaching for sustainable development in preschool

Abstract

In this article we analyze preschool teacher students' conversations during the planning of a teaching project concerned with sustainable development. Previous research shows that teaching situations often involve strategies of achieving behavioral change; i.e. teaching “the right way” to handle garbage, and less activities allowing children to value and critically discuss sustainability issues. We take a pragmatic theoretical perspective to identify discourses on didactic choices created by teacher students during seminars. Texts in the form of transcripts of audio recordings from three seminars were analyzed, with the purpose of determining what didactical dilemmas were created in the students’ discussions and in their reasoning about how to solve them. The results show a didactic dilemma common among the five groups of students. A tension between content as given, based on the curriculum, and content as created, based on children’s experiences and ideas. Furthermore, the teacher students verbalized a third way of handling content, involving oscillating between given and created content. This oscillation allowed them to avoid normative teaching and instead achieve pluralistic teaching. Pluralistic teaching does not exclude predefined content such as facts, but it also includes other knowledge sources as well as allowing children to form their own opinions about sustainability issues.

Keywords:

• Preschool
• sustainable development
• teaching
• didactics

Introduction

Sustainability issues, such as climate change, are characterized by a high degree of complexity and includes unpredictable consequences when responding to them. Since these issues concurrently concern the environment (including natural and man-made resources), the society and the economy, the importance of including education for sustainable development (ESD) in early childhood education (ECE) are stressed (Somerville and Williams 2015; Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Östman 2015). Researchers in this field are calling for new ways of teaching for sustainable development that reach beyond current teaching habits (Lundegård and Caiman 2019; Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lidar 2014, Huggins and Evans 2018; Vare and Scott 2007). Preschools in Sweden have a long tradition of teaching about the environment rather than teaching issues about and for sustainable development. Ärlemalm-Hagsér and Sundberg (2016) show that preschool professionals primarily associate education for sustainable development with nature encounters and sorting waste. Other Swedish studies reveal that preschools primarily work with teaching children proactive environmental habits such as conserving resources and sorting waste, as well as supporting them in transforming recycled materials into useful things (Hedefalk 2018; Ärlemalm-Hagsér, Berg, and Sandberg 2018). The teaching described above can be understood as fact based or normative teaching approach. The teacher focus the learning content on scientific facts about how the world works or value the right way to handle sustainable issues before the teaching situation. A pluralistic teaching approach involves teachers who do not necessarily present, or have, the answers of what is sustainable. It is up to the child to critically explore the sustainable issue and make up her own idea of how it should be approached (Sandell, Östman, and Öhman 2005).

Furthermore, studies show that preschool professionals are often not certain how to handle sustainability issues in teaching (Ärlemalm-Hagsér and Sundberg 2016; Furu, Wolff, and Suomela 2018; Grodziéska-Jurczak et al. 2006; Tomas, Girgenti, and Jackson 2017; Walshe and Tait 2019). Research show how preschool teachers need to create conditions for children to take action, to make their voices heard, and to understand that there are alternative ways to act (Caiman and Lundegård 2014; Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lidar 2014). Furthermore, it is important for children to use their imagination and be creative when dealing with the complexity and uncertainty of challenges concerning sustainable development (Sandri 2013; Lundegård and Caiman 2019).

An extensive body of research shows that education for sustainable development struggles with several challenges (Wals 2010; Laessø, 2007). Conducting education based on top-down, instrumental approaches imbued with normativity carries a risk of indoctrination (van Poeck, Goeminne, and Vandenabeele 2016). Moreover, when students have fewer opportunities to think and act based on their own motives, values and beliefs, the basis of democracy in education is at stake. If students’ ownership and thoughts are highly restricted in an expertise-driven education, unique ideas and suggestions might be overshadowed by already established facts.

When Mouffe’s (2013) political proclamations regarding defending democracy in all public life are followed, people’s sovereignty is indeed stretched. According to us, education is included in “all public life”, and if applying this political project on democracy as something belonging to all people, education has to provide rich opportunities whereby learning is foremost regarded as a matter of democratic participation (cf. van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2012). Consequently, when issues about sustainable development are addressed in line with a pluralistic education, different conflicts of interest emerge as teacher students bring about diverse concerns and values, as well as building on different knowledge resources (Lundegård 2007). However, a pluralistic education also deals with challenges, for instance the risk of being trapped in relativism in terms of “everything counts” ending up in deliberative “talk” as it assigns equal value to all opinions (van Poeck, Goeminne, and Vandenabeele 2016, p. 807).

To summarize, there are several educational challenges involved with teaching for sustainable development (van Poeck, Goeminne, and Vandenabeele 2016). On the one hand, privileging an education based on expertise and facts with the teacher primarily in charge might render passive citizens and hollow out democracy. On the other hand, conducting teaching based mostly on students’ diverse concerns in which the learning content is negotiated might overshadow structural and global perspectives in regards to matters of sustainable development (Caiman and Lundegård 2018).

In this article, we are particularly interested in planning for teaching in terms of preschool activities and learning content (cf. van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2012). We approach the call for novel teaching by analyzing preschool teacher students’ conversations on planning for teaching for sustainable development. In doing so, we detect the specific problems they encounter, invent, and struggle with during their discussions.

Teaching in preschool

In preschool teacher education, students need to learn about, discuss, and make decisions concerning teaching and learning in preschool. In the newly revised curriculum for Swedish preschools, the concept “teaching” is used for the first time (National Agency for Education 2018). However, there are different views among preschool teachers regarding what teaching in preschool should involve (Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lundqvist 2015; Hilden 2018; School Inspection 2016; Thulin and Redfors 2017). Research shows that some preschool teachers fear that the teaching in preschool will become too similar to the teaching in schools, in terms of knowledge transfer (cf. Due et al. 2018).

Many research studies give examples of an uncertainty in how to perform preschool teaching. For example, one study on preschool teaching has explored how cultural factors in preschools interact with the teachers’ shaping of science-related activities (Sundberg et al. 2018). Other examples of the ambiguity regarding how preschool teaching is to be conducted can be seen in studies emphasizing that it is important that the teacher, before a teaching situation, define relevant learning content (see for example Jonsson 2008; Jonsson, Williams, and Pramling Samuelsson 2017; Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling 2008). All these studies show that it is imperative that the teacher direct the children’s attention towards specific learning content.

In another set of studies, learning content is described as being created in the moment and hence not necessarily defined in advance (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2014; Sundberg et al. 2018). This does not mean that the teacher does not know what the children need to learn, but that the knowledge content is grounded primarily in the children’s explorations in the moment (Olsson, Dahlberg, and Theorell 2016). In both types of studies the preschool teachers are interested in the child’s experiences and interests, but with one group placing them in the background with the teacher having the most crucial influence on the learning content, and the other group treating them as a foreground for deciding what learning content to focus on. These two teaching approaches can be described as a goal-rational process and a goal-relational process (Lind 2010, 24–25). The goal-rational process is based on the idea that the question/topic contains certain, already known answers (Nilsson, Lecusay, and Alnevik 2018). It thus follows that the teacher’s main role is in guiding the children toward this already known discovery. The goal-relational process has a more dynamic procedure: Depending on what impulses, connections, and concepts the children anticipate in the moment, new directions and turns might lead to new questions and topics.

Aim

In this study, we investigate preschool teacher students’ conversations about teaching as they plan education for sustainable development. These students have had research-based lectures about education for sustainable development, and are not yet formed by the educational culture of preschool. In analyzing their discussions, we explore novel ways of teaching for sustainable development. We also want to inquiry what didactic dilemmas they encounter in the planning phase and what didactic choices they make in order to handle these dilemmas.

Making didactic choices

In Sweden, preschool teachers are responsible for selecting the content and ways of working in their practice. For example, Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lundqvist (2015) show how some learning content is prioritized by teachers while other learning content is excluded. Hjälmeskog et al. (2020) argue for the need to depart from the child’s own experiences but also to challenge the child to have new experiences. Similarly, Hellberg, Thulin, and Redford’s (2019) study shows that the learning content varies depending on the context and the child group to be taught. Hence, teacher students need to learn how to adapt the learning content to the specific child group, as well as to handle the tension between given content and other everyday routines.

As pointed out in the Teaching in preschool section, it seems possible to divide the research on didactical choices regarding learning content into two groups: one in which the teacher has a crucial influence on learning content, and one in which the child has a crucial influence on the learning content. However, regardless of which view steers the learning content, there might be various risks involved. The teacher’s responsibility and leadership could be hollowed out if the children’s interests are privileged at the expense of the curriculum’s overall purposes (cf. Johansson and Wickman 2011). An emphasis on teaching and learning framed by an explorative approach also struggles with the didactic challenge involved with posing initiated questions in order to deepen children’s learning (Elfström 2013; Caiman and Halvars 2020; Olsson 2013).

In summary, there is no consensus in the research on how preschool teachers should teach or what learning content is considered relevant. However, interpreting which didactic choices are relevant is something teacher students need to learn to handle in relation to teaching for sustainable development.

Context of the study

The study is based on recordings of seminars where teacher students in groups of five to six planned a project concerning the issue of sustainable development, for an imaginary group of preschool children, age range of 1–5 years. In their third semester, the teacher students participated in the course “Technology and Science in Preschool”, offering 7.5 credit points. Ninety-six students participated in three seminars (32 students per seminar) in spring 2018. We analyzed a total of five group discussions from the seminars. The selection of informants naturally fell on the students who gave their consent. The students’ average age was 29 years. The discussions lasted 25–28 min per group, with a total of 93 min transcribed and analyzed.

The students attended a lecture presenting current research on education for sustainable development, and at the following seminar a case was described to them. In the case, preschool children found garbage in a nearby forest. Based on this case, the purpose of the seminar was to develop the students’ ability to discuss didactic choices regarding teaching in preschool for sustainable development. The seminar leader and the lecturer encouraged the students to think innovatively as they planned for their project.

Pragmatic discourse analysis

As we take a pragmatic perspective on learning and meaning-making, the analytical focus is on situated human practices (Dewey 1916; [1925] 1958). Within the frame of pragmatics, learning is regarded as social and context-dependent – we create meaning jointly with others.

In pragmatic discourse analysis the use of language is analyzed, here particularly during the seminar the preschool teacher students attend. The students’ use of words shows the rules that govern their language use. The rules are thus created by the students and the teacher during the course, and can be understood as norms and values for what is and is not relevant to say (Östman 1995). Through the identification of patterns and regularities in what is said during the seminar, language use and the meaning that is created are made visible (Östman 2010).

From a pragmatic discourse theoretical perspective, discourses can be identified in both language and text (Quennerstedt 2008). In the present study, texts in the form of transcripts of audio recordings from three seminars are analyzed, with the purpose of determining what didactical dilemmas are created in the students’ discussions and in their reasoning around how to solve them. The purpose is set in motion together with the transcripts, and the interpretative process emerges as discourses (Östman 1999; Quennerstedt 2008).

Analytical procedure

To identify the dilemmas that arise in the discussions among the teacher students, we start by reading the transcripts to become acquainted with the text. We read the text based on its original premise; that is, the meaning that is created when the students talk to each other based on the purpose of the seminar. Here we analyze what the students say based on the content they encounter in the course, their task, and the context in which they are located.

We use PEA (Practical Epistemology Analysis) to analyze the meaning-making in the recorded conversations, and use the analytical concepts of gap, stand fast, and relation (Wickman and Östman 2002). Gaps appear now and then in the conversation, showing as hesitation or expressions of frustration about teaching and the didactic choices teaching involves. The students then need to fill these gaps to be able to continue their meaning-making about teaching, which can be done by establishing relations to what stands fast. In this study, this involves the relation between learning content and teacher as well as learning content and child. The students have to deal with how the content can be created and who is in control of creating it (see for example Hjälmeskog et al. 2020). When the conversation flows, no one hesitates; what is said stands fast – that is, they understand each other and the meaning-making can proceed.

In the next step of the analysis we read the transcripts “from within and out” (cf. Säfström 1999), which in this study means that we relate the text to the context of the planning and execution of education for sustainable development. We analyze what is excluded in the transcripts, which shows what is taken for granted or what hinders the meaning-making. Questions we ask include: What are the students excluding from the project? What becomes problematic in teaching?

To help us identify what they do not talk about, we use the tensions between different views of teaching in preschool, found in research (see Jonsson, Williams, and Pramling Samuelsson 2017; Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling 2008; Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2014; Nilsson, Lecusay, and Alnevik 2018; Lind 2010; Sundberg et al. 2018). In short, the tension involves the teacher as a crucial influence on the learning content, or the child as a crucial influence on the learning content. Finally, we present implications of the students’ discussions about the project, didactic dilemmas, and how they handle these dilemmas.

Results

The common didactic dilemma among the five student groups consists of a tension between content as given, based on the curriculum, and content as created, based on children’s experiences and ideas. Furthermore, a third way of handling content among the students entails combining given and created content. The dilemma concerns the balancing act of, on the one hand, conducting teaching initiated and didactically designed by the teacher, and on the other hand, considering the value of taking care of and encouraging the children’s creative suggestions. The students’ discussions alternated between these two views of determining learning content.

We will present three illustrative examples that coincide with the overall purpose of the article. First, we present a situation in which the students’ express frustration about planning the project (Excerpt 1). In this example, they position the children as the ones who should take control of the content, and express frustration over having to make a relevant didactic choice.

Excerpt 1, from student discussion: example of students’ frustration at having to make didactic choices.

618: If they ask,…eh what do you think?

619: We don’t give them answers to anything!

620: What a pain.

621: What do we do?

622: But, if they ask?

623: Always bounce it back!

624: Never getting an answer? That’s so annoying.

When Student 1 expresses hesitation regarding how to handle children’s questions (Row 618), a gap appears involving a didactic choice concerning learning content: who creates the content and how? What stands fast is that the teacher should not transfer knowledge: “We don’t give them answers to anything” (Row 619). The other students do not contradict the statement but instead confirm it with, first, an emotional statement “What a pain”, accepting that as teachers they cannot give answers, even though this is painful. The gap lingers as the student on Row 621 still does not know how to handle children’s questions: “What do we do”? On Row 623, a relation is created between what stands fast and the gap through the suggestion that the child has the answer: “Always bounce it back”. When the question is bounced back to the child, the child creates learning content to answer it. The gap lingers, though, as the students express frustration at not being able to answer the children’s questions; see Row 620, “What a pain”, and later in the conversation Row 624, “That’s so annoying”. This hesitation regarding the children’s influence on the learning content is also verbalized in another student discussion: “But what’s the end result? What are we working towards?” (Row 821). In this discussion, the students highlight the difficulties involved in determining learning goals. They do not know whether they should decide the learning goals or not.

Discussions concerning predefined learning content

We will now present the meaning-making processes when the students land at either end of the tension of the didactic dilemma. Then, we will show how they handle the tension.

In the example in excerpt 2, we present a situation in which the students use predefined learning content from the curriculum in which the children are to learn what garbage materials can be burned and what can be composted. The students’ plan for the children is to experience inquiries by performing a scientific sorting test. The students discuss which didactic choices are more innovative than others, and want to plan for creative and not overly normative teaching situations. As we enter the excerpt, a student is formulating a suggestion for relevant content (Table 2).

Excerpt 2, from student discussion: predefined learning content.

654: You (the teacher) can use materials, in a gathering, then you have different materials. Ask the children, “What do you think? Do you think this is bad for the environment?”

655: Maybe they should sort (the garbage) into two different piles? What’s good and what’s (bad)?

656: That nature can decompose this object.

657: That they can sort.

658: I think this is a great activity but it’s not something that can be regarded as outside the box in general. It’s a fairly common practice. Like, but a good exercise.

The gap in this example involves the didactic choice concerning the relation between content and teacher and between content and child. The students create relations to what stands fast: that garbage is relevant content, and how to include the garbage in a relevant way in a teaching situation. Here, they take control of the learning content. Student 1 suggests that the children ought to discuss the impact different materials have on the environment (Row 654). Student 2 voices that the children can sort the material into two different piles: good and bad (Row 655). Another relation is construed to the sorting of garbage piles, with the statement “That nature can decompose this object” (Row 656). The suggestion to sort materials is confirmed by another student (Row 657). No hesitation is expressed but rather a confirming remark: “That they can sort” (Row 657). The activity is regarded as a good exercise in which children can learn which garbage is compostable and which is not (Row 658). The gap involving making didactic choices regarded as “outside the box” lingers, however. The students manage to plan for a “good” well-known science exercise, but do not develop a plan for new forms of teaching for sustainable development.

The meaning created concerning relevant learning content involves the children’s learning about different materials and their impact on the environment. While it is the child who conducts the inquiry, it is the student teacher who decides that an inquiry is a relevant learning activity. Making inquiries is predefined in the curriculum: “Education should give every child opportunity to explore, ask questions and discuss …” (National Agency for Education 2018, p. 10). Hence, the students discuss predefined learning content: making inquiries. This episode could also be described as a goal-rational process (Nilsson, Lecusay, and Alnevik 2018), in which the science purpose (learning about organic and non-organic materials and their characteristics) contains particular answers and the teacher’s role is to guide the children through the science inquiry towards the discovery of what can be burned and what cannot.

Discussions concerning created learning content

Excerpt 3 presents an example of the students discussion on how they can allow the children to create learning content by departing from the children’s questions. The discussion concern using the children’s potential meaning-making about the garbage they encounter in the forest.

Excerpt 3, from student discussion: created learning content.

291: Perhaps a child says it’s good that a soda can is lying there (in the garbage pile). I can play with it.

292: The ants can live there.

293: Yes, the ants can live there, like.

294: Yes, to continue talking that way.

295: Yes, talking about that can, we can go back to the cows. You think it’s good that there’s a can there? The ants can live there. But then the can ends up in a hay bale. And then, the cows eat it. Is that good?

…

301: It doesn’t have to be garbage in all situations. Sometimes it can be garbage. The same ice cream paper that’s great for my ice cream not to like…

302: Melt.

303: Yes, to melt on me. It’s really bad to have in the forest. Or the same soil that’s in the forest is quite dirty if it ends up indoors on the table. So garbage is something relative.

The gap in this example involves the didactic choice concerning the relation between content and teacher and between content and child. In the example the child is positioned in the foreground; more particularly, the child’s thoughts about garbage are highlighted. The students create relations between garbage and the learning content, and what is regarded as garbage is not determined beforehand by the teacher. Knowledge about garbage is created among the children in the situation. The students suggest that the children come up with several ideas regarding what a soda can could be. It could be garbage, or a house for an ant. It could also be transformed into a child’s toy or become a hazard to a cow (Rows 291–294). The meaning-making about the garbage ends up in an understanding of garbage as something relative, and nothing the teacher can determine beforehand. Listening to the children’s thoughts and experiences concerning garbage can help them learn about the garbage based on their peers’ ideas. The learning content is thus created within the group of children.

Based on this transcript, this teaching planning approach can be described as a goal-relational process that can lead to new questions to further explore. The learning content is to some extent determined beforehand: for the child to develop the courage to voice an opinion and offer suggestions about sustainable development. But, what opinions are to be raised or realized is not determined beforehand. The teacher aims for several opinions to be raised by the children (in accordance with a pluralistic approach). Hence, it is the children who create the learning content. Based on this excerpt, the child can create several lines of action (involving how to handle the garbage) involving their peers and the teacher. The teacher’s role is to support the children in creating new knowledge in line with whatever they come up with.

Above, we have analyzed two situations in which the teacher students have landed in either predefined learning content, based on the curriculum, or created learning content rooted in the children’s questions and concerns. Recurring in almost all the student groups is the suggestion of a teacher-initiated activity in which the children nail different materials to a plank, bury it in the ground, and later dig it up to see what has and has not composted. On several occasions, they also suggest that the children find scientific facts in books or use other digital sources to gain science knowledge. Although they suggest predefined learning content in their discussions, they more often propose learning content created by the children. To stretch this, the tension between curriculum and child often results in a win for the child at the expense of the curriculum. The way the students repeatedly talk about facts, however, does not concern transferring predefined facts to the children (in line with a normative approach). Rather, they highlight the value of being attentive to the children’s voices, and cite the importance of supporting children in asking questions, exploring, and seeking answers.

Handling the didactic dilemma by combining predefined and created content

The students handle the didactic dilemma by oscillating between predefined and created learning content. As a result of letting the children inquire about or discuss what garbage might be, knowledge about garbage is created in the situation rather than being determined in advance by the teacher. The children can suggest that an empty soda can might be garbage to a human but a home for an ant, or deadly material in a cow’s stomach. Furthermore, garbage can be picked up by humans or robots, or broken down on site. The potential garbage holds can also be perceived as that of a treasure or as smelly, or even as dangerous to one’s health. The students suggest several explanations (from the children) as to why the garbage ends up in the forest and not in a garbage can. One thing that is clear in all the student groups is that they position the children’s ideas about garbage in the center. The ideas do not come out of thin air but through inquiry, which allows the teacher to determine the learning content: to find facts about garbage from different resources. Hence, the students manage to bridge the didactic dilemma by both defining learning content in line with the curriculum and letting the children create content by listening to their thoughts and conducting investigations. This is in line with a pluralistic teaching approach.

We divided the different ways the students discussed how to answer children’s questions into four activities: conducting inquiries, doing interviews, participating in discussions, and actions to make a difference. Inquiries focus on how the children handle garbage in their own homes, at the recycling center, and at the local grocery store. Interviews focus on why citizens litter. Discussions focus on values. More precisely, in the discussions, the students suggested that the child group could paint various scenarios, such as a clean and a dirty park or a future scenario. These aesthetic activities would serve as the basis for discussions of issues concerning sustainable development among the children. Furthermore, the students would also initiate a discussion on “What’s garbage to you, an ant, a cow, or a crow?”. Actions to make a difference involve the children writing letters to the municipality with the aim of making a change, demonstrating, building garbage cans, and holding an exhibition at the local library.

The discussion about garbage involved not telling the children what garbage is, but rather letting them create their own values ​​and assumptions about it. For example, letting the children themselves decide what they consider to be garbage in the forest would allow them to then discuss the children’s potentially different perceptions of garbage back at the preschool. The child is always at the center, but so is the child group and the opportunities it offers for learning. Gathering facts and thoughts about garbage as a group offers the children an opportunity to share a variety of values ​​concerning garbage. Listening to others, the students suggest, also offers an opportunity for the children to change their own values. Other suggestions by the students for enabling the children to find facts and values involve discussing their opinions as to why people in the local community litter.

Discussion

In this study, we investigated the teacher students’ didactic choices, what dilemmas they encountered in the planning phase, and how they handled these dilemmas. We extracted one common dilemma in the students’ discussions, consisting of a tension between given content and created content. The dilemma involves a didactic balancing act of conducting teaching initiated and didactically designed by the teacher on the one hand, and conducting teaching initiated by the children’s creative suggestions on the other. A third way of handling learning content involved oscillating between given and created content.

The dilemma that emerges in the teacher student discussions is not new, however; the dilemma we identified is similar to those that are well-known among teachers who are active in both preschool and elementary school (see for example Due et al. 2018; Jonsson, Williams, and Pramling Samuelsson 2017; Jonsson 2008). But while the didactic dilemma is not new, the meaning-making in the discussions among the teacher students resulted in a new way to manage content concerning sustainable development. Previous research shows that garbage in teaching situations often involves strategies of achieving behavioral change, which is difficult to bring about. Accordingly, in earlier studies, teachers communicate to the children what they consider is “the right way” to handle garbage: to sort, recycle, or reuse it (e.g. Ärlemalm-Hagsér, Berg, and Sandberg 2018). Furthermore, what is unsustainable is already defined in advance, and there are no activities that allow children to take a stand for themselves or act critically. Based on this empirical study, the result of the teacher students’ struggle with the didactical dilemma consisted mostly of the creation of learning content based on the children’s interests and experiences. This allowed the students to let the children problematize “garbage”, as opposed to transforming predefined knowledge of what garbage is. What garbage is depends on what the children discover while conducting explorations and investigations. It is not determined in advance whether garbage in the forest is sustainable or unsustainable; the children’s task is to make discoveries and draw their own conclusions. Hence, the children are given the opportunity to participate and form opinions (van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2012). When designing for teaching in accordance with a pluralistic approach, the children are also supported in investigating why people litter, and get to influence how the garbage is handled in their local environment. The students’ argument is based on the ambition to avoid normative claims like “You shouldn’t throw garbage in the forest”. The way the students handle the learning content is to allow the children’s interests and curiosity to guide it. “Perhaps a child says it´s good that a soda can is lying there (in the garbage pile). I can play with it”. “The ants can live there”. “It doesn´t have to be garbage in all situations” (Excerpt 3). But the students do not let the children take total control over the teaching; they handle the didactic dilemma by ensuring that the children do not lose focus on the issue of sustainability linked to garbage in the forest.

This way of oscillating between given and created content allows the teacher to avoid normative teaching and instead achieve pluralistic teaching. Pluralistic teaching does not exclude facts, but it also includes other knowledge sources as well as allowing children to form their own opinions about issues, in this case about sustainable development. If the learning content is restricted to either predefined learning content or the child’s creation of learning content, the teaching might not evolve. If the learning content is solely created by the children, the learning situation might result in random learning content and the children could lose sight of the shared intended learning content (Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lundqvist 2015). To help children stay focused on common educational content, it is important that the teacher bring predefined learning content concerning sustainable development into the teaching situation. Otherwise, the children’s impulses may cause the content to spread out in different directions and the interest in sustainable development may land in the interest of something completely different (see also Hedefalk, Almqvist, and Lundqvist 2015). What seems important to teach, in line with the pluralistic teaching tradition, is not to anchor oneself in either side of the didactic dilemma; instead, as the student teacher discussions show, an oscillation between predefined and created content is important. Hence, the teacher needs to both predefine learning content and create learning content with the children.

Children’s growth of agency is highlighted as an important aspect of education for sustainable development (Caiman and Lundegård 2014). This educational idea of supporting children’s agency for change is in alignment with the curriculum goal to “develop a growing responsibility and to actively participate in society” (National Agency for Education 2018, p. 5). This social dimension of education for sustainable development is also implicitly included in the students’ projects, with the children having the opportunity to influence their municipality. They can do this by writing to politicians, holding an exhibition at the local library, or protesting against littering in the community. They learn how they can make their voices heard, and how they can influence for change. The students also suggest that the children be allowed to explore and learn about such scientific concepts as decay, degradation, and ecological systems. They challenge the children to explore how citizens in their municipality think about waste, enable them to value different ways of thinking about future scenarios, and allow them to form their own opinions about sustainable development, all by alternating between given and created content based on their curiosity and engagement. These teacher students show a way of teaching for sustainable development in which children’s agency is highlighted, offering a pluralism of ways of thinking and acting whereby the child forms his or her own opinion. They do not suggest an education for sustainable development focusing on the idea of attaining behavioral change as reported in previous studies (cf. Ärlemalm-Hagsér, Berg, and Sandberg 2018). Hence, based on our empirical findings, this could be regarded as new ways of planning for teaching.

A didactic implication of this study relates to the idea of learning as democratic participation, situated in the field of education for sustainable development (van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2012). Planning for teaching for sustainable development projects and themes addresses teachers’ responsibility in introducing methods for children to be acquainted with, as well as encouraging the young generation to purposefully creatively participate when facing “wicked” sustainability issues. Furthermore, another teaching responsibility entails departing from children’s questions and concerns in order to value their own problems involving concerns and growth of agency (Caiman and Lundegård 2014). Another dimension in planning for teaching for sustainable development involves educating young learners to reach beyond conventional ways of acting and to contribute through novelty and change.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Hedefalk

Maria Hedefalk Senior Lecurer of Curriculum Studies at Uppsala University. In her research, she focuses on questions about teaching in preschool both in general terms as in specific terms of teaching for a sustainable development. She also teach at the university program for preschool teachers.

Cecilia Caiman

Cecilia Caiman is a Senior Lecturer in Science Education at Stockholm University. Research interests are in education and teaching for sustainable development, the role of aesthetics in science class, creativity processes in education and digital learning in science. She participates in various research projects on the topics.

Christina Ottander

Christina Ottander is professor in Science Education at the Department of Science and Mathematics Education, Umeå University, Sweden. Her research interests concern socio-scientific issues, teachers' professional development, and early years science education including didactic modeling for sustainable development.

Jonas Almqvist

Jonas Almqvist is professor of Curriculum Studies at Uppsala University and leader of the research group Studies of Comparative Didactics (SCOD). In his research, he focuses on questions about the relationship between teaching and learning in various subjects and he participates in a number of research projects and networks.