Katrien Van Poeck

Learning from sustainable development: education in the light of public issues

Education for sustainable development plays an increasing role in environmental education policy and practice. In this article, we show how sustainable development is mainly seen as a goal that can be achieved by applying the proper processes of learning and how this learning perspective translates sustainability issues into learning problems of individuals. We present a different perspective on education for sustainable development and emphasize the importance of presenting issues of sustainable development as ‘public issues’, i.e. as matters of public concern. This shifts the focus from the competences that citizens must acquire to the democratic nature of the spaces and practices in which participation and citizenship can develop.

Revisiting the democratic paradox of environmental and sustainability education: sustainability issues as matters of concern

In this article, we address the democratic paradox in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) by drawing on Bruno Latour’s conceptual distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’ and the notion of attachments that goes with it. We present an analysis of three cases (nature excursions, workshops that promote ecological behavioural change and making documentary films) focusing on how diverse educational practices deal with sustainability issues as matters of fact, matters of value and/or matters of concern. We examine how these Latourian concepts incite an analysis of educational practices that enriches the discussion about the democratic paradox in ESE. This finally brings us to point out how a concern-oriented ESE might take shape.

Taking stock of the UN Decade of education for sustainable development: the policy-making process in Flanders

In this paper, we address the implementation of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Flanders, a sub-national entity of Belgium. Our analysis shows how the policy-making process in Flanders is inextricably intertwined with three developments in environmental and educational policy: the increasing impact of ESD policy and discourse on environmental education, the framing of social and political problems as learning problems, and ecological modernisation. These trends give shape to a post-ecologist and post-political policy regime and, thus, affect what is possible and acceptable within Flemish ESD policy. However, this case study also revealed that these developments do not completely determine ESD policy-making in Flanders. Our examination thus allowed us to understand how the actual policy translation in a particular local setting brings about powers that legitimise and maintain as well as counteract the bounds of the policy regime that emerged in the context of the UN Decade.

Education as a response to sustainability issues. Practices of environmental education in the context of the United Nations Decade of education for sustainable development

This study analysed seven practices of environmental education (EE) within a changing policy discourse in Belgium brought about by the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Sustainability issues have far-reaching consequences that are complex, uncertain, persistent and contested. These features provide a challenge for understandings of EE/ ESD that see education as primarily instrumental. Intentionally or not, the rhetoric of the Decade of ESD frames education pre-eminently as an instrument to tackle social and ecological challenges, thus positioning sustainability as a goal that can be reached by applying ‘proper’ learning strategies to the teaching of ‘proper’ competencies or behaviours. Yet, as this study argues, this narrow focus is inadequate for grasping what is at stake in educational practices addressing sustainability issues. The study shows how scholarly critique of EE/ESD challenges the expectation that education can solve social and political problems, while arguing that education cannot neglect the far-reaching implications of sustainability issues. In identifying the variety of positions that exist, the paradox between taking into account sustainability concerns and acknowledging the existing plurality of opinions, values and knowledge claims is made evident. Case studies of EE/ESD practices in Belgium illustrate how care for an issue can incite a worthwhile educational process, although this is not fostered in EE/ESD policy-making processes. The enactment of concern and responsibility for a sustainability problem can give rise to educational settings that foster sustained attentiveness to the issue at stake, and a profound exploration of how a multiplicity of actors is jointly caught up in it, through various and often irreconcilable commitments, dependencies, interests and involvements. In doing so, these practices enable a form of EE/ESD that moves beyond a dichotomised contradistinction between pluralistic and sustainability concerns. Encouraging people to study an issue, to take into account the effect it has on others and to respond to the dilemmas, controversies and mutually exclusive commitments, interests and concerns inherent in it, can prevent falling into an ‘anything-goes’ relativism as well as move beyond a narrow focus on the transfer of taken-for-granted guidelines on how to think and act.

The political tendency in environmental and sustainability education

This article presents a categorisation of the different situations in which the political dimension of environmental and sustainability education can be handled and experienced in practice: the ‘political tendency’. Using a methodology inspired by Wittgenstein’s user perspective on language, we empirically identified situations that express the political tendency by looking for language games centred around the question of how to organise social life, recognising that this inevitably requires decision-making about different and competing alternatives. Classifying these situations resulted in a typology (the political tendency) that distinguishes ‘Democratic participation’, ‘Political reflection’, ‘Political deliberation’ (sub-divided into ‘Normative deliberation’, ‘Consensus-oriented deliberation’ and ‘Conflict-oriented deliberation’) and ‘Political moment’. Next, we discuss the developed typology from an educative perspective, showing that the distinguished situations in the political tendency differ as to how they enable the foregrounding and backgrounding of different educational goals: preparation, socialisation and person-formation (i.e. identification and subjectification as perspective shifting and subjectification as dismantling).

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.

An exploration of sustainability change agents as facilitators of nonformal learning: mapping a moving and intertwined landscape

We explore the variety of ways in which change agents try to contribute to sustainable development and how, by doing so, they enable different forms of learning. Drawing on research literature as well as empirical studies, we distinguish a diversity of change agency roles. We then describe and develop an ideal typology of change agents according to how they relate to two fields of tension: that between instrumental vs. open-ended approaches to change and learning, and that between personal detachment vs. involvement. Finally, we compare the developed ideal types, i.e., Technician, Convincer, Mediator, and Concerned Explorer, with empirical examples and suggest a dynamic reading of the typology as a landscape in which change agents move between and across different positions according to changing and shifting contexts.

Education and Sustainability Issues: An Analysis of Publics-in-the-Making

The dominant discourse on education for sustainable development (ESD) approaches education as an instrument to foster the values and principles of sustainable development, to promote corresponding behavioural changes and to qualify people for the role of active participants that contribute to the democratic realisation of sustainable development. This reflects what Biesta calls a ‘socialisation conception of civic learning’, assuming an instrumental relationship between education, citizenship and democracy. Yet, reducing civic learning to the socialisation of everyone into the same standard fails to acknowledge citizenship as an essentially contested concept and tends to exclude marginalised voices and alternative arguments and points of view. This is particularly problematic in the context of sustainability issues that are pre-eminently open to uncertainty and contestation and characterised by strongly intertwined, often irreconcilable values, interests and knowledge claims. In this chapter, we present a different perspective on ESD, one that enables to understand how educational processes can move beyond a socialisation perspective and at the same time face the ambiguous relation between democracy and sustainable development. This demands educational practices that approach sustainability issues as ‘public issues’, as matters of public concern. We present an analysis of two cases as an attempt to further understand how educational practices can address sustainability issues as public issues. We use an analytical framework inspired by Bruno Latour, actor–network theory and the policy arrangements approach.

Environmental and sustainability education in the Benelux countries: Research, policy and practices at the intersection of education and societal transformation

Abstract As an introductory article of a Special Issue on Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in the Benelux region, this paper provides an overview of ESE research, policy and practice in Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. It discusses the different contributions in this collection with regard to how the central theme of this issue, the relation between education and societal transformation, is approached in each paper. The main characteristics of the ESE research fields in the Benelux are described in general terms, and placed within the context of how ESE policy and practice are organised in these countries. Next, different conceptualisations of the relation between educational and political spaces reflected in the collection are discussed and the varied contributions to this issue are positioned in relation to three distinguished traditions of approaching the place of democracy in ESE. The authors conclude with commenting on how this relates to different approaches to the research-policy-practice interface.

The roots and routes of environmental and sustainability education policy research – an introduction to a virtual special issue

This article introduces the themes of a virtual special issue (VSI) of Environmental Education Research (http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/ceer-vsi) focused on policy research in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). The broad purpose behind preparing the VSI was to consider the challenges involved in linking particular concepts of environment and sustainability with key themes in educational policy, and how this remains a heavily contested practice. Examples drawn from two decades of studies published in the journal show how these might be illustrated, addressed, problematized and possibly transcended. The introduction traces how ESE researchers have dealt with key trends, complexities and issues in the policy-practice-research nexus both conceptually and empirically. It also illustrates how researchers within the field might reimagine and reinvigorate policy research on ESE, and how working with researchers from other fields who offer different perspectives, ideas and expertise might aid the cross-fertilisation of a complex terrain of ideas, policy and practice. In so doing, we hope the accompanying VSI inspires renewed interest into the (at times, fickle) relationship between ESE, and the dual worlds of possibility and tension that take place both within, and surrounding, their fields of policy and research.