29. marts 2007

By Torben Clausen (toc@dpu.dk)

When politicians don't know how to deal with an issue, they call upon schools and education to do something. That, anyway, is the cynical explanation for why ESD, or Education for Sustainable Development, made it to the top of the international agenda, as exemplified by the UN's Decade for ESD from 2005 to 2014: A free and uncontroversial choice pulled out of a hat at the last minute of the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 by politicians, who find it impossible to initiate real action against global issues such as the environment, development and poverty, and who have to admit that the international effort against climate change has failed to live up to the objectives. Blame it on the schools, a convenient solution to an inconvenient problem.

This version is not exactly wrong, but it is only half the story: Schools and education do indeed play an important role in relation to sustainable development, and if ESD becomes widely recognised, it will be neither free, nor uncontroversial. Rather, it will be a political and formative project with a wide range of consequences for schools all over the world and for the distribution of political power.

This is how the two professors Bjarne Bruun Jensen and Karsten Schnack outline the playing field for ESD. Both deeply involved in research questions addressing environmental education and the role of schools and pedagogics in ensuring a sustainable development, they are committed to a field that has seen a meteoric rise to the top of the international agenda in recent years, not least because of former US vice president Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary about global warming.

"Schools definitely play a key role in establishing sustainable development. Not because schools are responsible for the problems and have to help solve them here and now, neither locally, regionally or globally. But eventually the whole thing boils down to the way people relate to this development. This ought to be part of general education," says Bjarne Bruun Jensen, who is the head of a research program for environmental and health education at the Danish University of Education. His view is shared by Karsten Schnack, who researches into, among other things, environmental eudcation in a democratic perspective:

"The schools have to form political people, to enable them to reflect on the issues in a qualified way, so that they can and will participate in democratic processes. And few people doubt that the issue of sustainable development is very high on the agenda now and in the foreseeable future," he says.

ESD denotes a radically different way of addressing environmental issues and society in general, one that, if it takes root in future generations, will incur vast changes in society, according to Karsten Schnack.

"The impact will be vast, if we really manage to reorient the way people think, so that they focus more on sustainable development than on the people as consumers or some of the other ideologies at play today. It will be a genuine revolution."

A controversial issue
One does not have to listen to the two researchers for very long to realise that ESD is much more than the traditional information campaigns that were meant to make pupils and everyone else conserve energy and water and whatnot and to stop flushing hazardous chemicals out the toilet. This focus on behavioural change alone has been replaced by a comprehensive and complex understanding of the environment as a societal issue that calls for societal decisions and action.

This notion can be traced back to the U.N.'s 1987-report 'Our Common Future', commonly known as the Brundtland Report, in which sustainable development was formulated as a "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

To put it in a nutshell: Our society must decide which of our current needs we can allow ourselves to fulfil here and now in relation to the needs of our descendants. This interpretation of the concept of sustainable development bridges the gap between a preserving ideology, that primarily aims to protect nature against the impact of human activity, and a view on economic development that aims to address environmental issues through development of new technology and knowledge.

"Sustainability signals an objective you can reach. Development indicates an on-going process. Sustainable development conjoins two fundamentally different and opposing ideologies, but the concept is not set in stone and the emphasis can still shift," Karsten Schnack explains.

With ESD, these unresolved ideological conflicts and dilemmas are included into the curriculum, which makes ESD much more than merely teaching of ecology and nature. Environmental issues are considered societal issues and political conflicts of interest become an unavoidable fact that the teaching must incorporate.

Objective: Action competence
These conflicts not only arise between different political ideologies, but also between different viewpoints: Environmental, economical, cultural and the social. The same issue may take on quite different characteristics depending on what viewpoint you adopt. As an example, Professor Bjarne Bruun Jensen points to the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg. He rose to international fame with his book 'The Sceptical Environmentalist' from 2001, in which he argues that environmental problems do not warrant the attention we lavish on them.

"The question Bjørn Lomborg keeps asking is how much environment we can get for our money. He is firmly seated in the sphere you could call economy, and from that vantage point he sets out to determine how to fix the other issues. You might just as well enter with another viewpoint and ask: How much economy can we get for our environment? It is a key element in ESD to present fundamentally different views on sustainable development and the potential future of the world."

One of the teaching methods that may result in the pupils learning this is to consider schools social systems where teaching is one among many important factors. Others would include the local environment, pollution, work environment, teacher's working conditions and society's interests. "What changes do we need to make our school sustainable?" could be one question that the pupils could work with.

In the research program, they are just now starting a development project for the Danish Ministry of Education. The researchers will attempt to describe the different elements that could be included in an ESD curriculum. Karsten Schnack lists four master categories that schools and teachers can use as starting points for the discussion about the curriculum:

Complex issues that must be considered from different angles to be fully understood.
Controversial issues that challenge pupils to discuss and form opinions on the underlying conflicts of interests.
Abstract concepts such as freedom, health and democracy that remain open, so that pupils learn to deal with open concepts.
A democratic aspect, so that pupils develop the competencies they need to seek influence on the agenda and on the applied methods.

The last point leads in to a concept that both professors have helped lift high on the international agenda, namely action competence. This is a key element in ESD according to Bjarne Bruun Jensen and Karsten Schnack, who, in a recently re-published article, have written about 'the action competence approach in environmental education': "[T]he aim of environmental education is to make students capable of envisioning alternative ways of development and to enable them to participate in acting according to these objectives."

The point is not to instil particular opinions to the environment in the pupils, or that the teaching in itself should aim to solve specific environmental issues. School should not moralise. It should, however, teach pupils to take action on authentic problems and issues, "?because we believe that this will lead to a qualitatively different learning and competence development," as Bjarne Bruun Jensen explains. That the concept action competence is normative is, however, not something Karsten Schnack tries to gloss over:

"In my view, action competence is first and foremost an aim with the teaching, a formative ideal closely related to creating political awareness. The ideal is to become a political person, one that learns about and relates to common issues. The original meaning of the Greek 'idiot' was that of a private person who only cared for himself and his own affairs. Action competence is a formative ideal that is aimed to prevent future generations from becoming idiots."

Individualisation or community?
Among the key words for teaching action competencies are, according to Bjarne Bruun Jensen:

Action, of course, because the pupils should not only discuss problems, but actually do something about them.
Participation, because a qualified dialogue between teacher and pupil leads to motivation and competence development, and
Collaboration, because the issues transcend the school, and because collaboration with, for instance, the local community will force the pupils to relate to and consider new types of questions.

These kinds of learning objectives are currently crowded out of the political debate by PISA-induced demands for improved individually acquired skills in literacy, math and task solving. Neither Bjarne Bruun Jensen nor Karsten Schnack find it problematic to synchronise academic content on one hand with collaborative teaching forms and social awareness on the other. They do, however see a problem in relation to the increased emphasis on individualised teaching throughout the Western world. Individualised teaching comes at the cost of a reduction in how much the pupil can learn about being part of a group or of a society. This trend was recently documented in an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research which Karsten Schnack co-authored.

The international challenge
One could also argue, however, that regardless of current reform trends and ideological crusades, it will not be the schools in the west that find it hardest to live up to the concept introduced by ESD. In this part of the world, formative work and the work with participatory educational approaches is typically emphasised. In many Third World-countries, on the other hand, schooling places much more emphasis on training, i.e. individual rehearsal of tables and rote learning.

When researchers from the DPU have collaborated with researchers from, for instance, Zimbabwe, ESD had to take place as after-school activities, even when the project aim was to let pupils in the two countries share experiences about activities that the Danish pupils carried out as part of their regular school activities during the day. Another complication is the democratic aspect, which is not necessarily welcome in every country. ESD, in other words, questions the very design of the schooling systems as well as the organisation of society in many countries.

This has not, however, prevented countries with different political and schooling systems than the Danish from taking inspiration from ESD and the concept of action competencies. "In some of the Asian countries we have collaborated with, we have seen a lot of interest in these concepts, because they have this potential for introducing democracy already in primary education. But of course the concepts are transformed each time they are introduced in a new context. Our experiences from Europe, Asia and Africa show this clearly," says Bjarne Bruun Jensen. This is a field of research that he and his colleagues will prioritise in the coming years, with the aim to contribute to making ESD a genuine global change agent for all the world's educational systems and maybe even to spur a fundamental change in the way people think worldwide.

From sustainable development to ESD
"There can be few more pressing and critical goals for the future of humankind than to ensure steady improvement in the quality of life for this and future generations, in a way that respects our common heritage – the planet we live on." This is how the UNESCO describe the organisation's view on sustainable development at the website for the UN's Decade for Sustainable Development.

That international political efforts in relation to the climate and the environment place so much emphasis on education for sustainable development, or ESD, is mainly due to three watershed events:

The UN report 'Our Common Future', the so-called Brundtland Report from 1987, which put the concept of sustainable development on the international agenda, and which managed to combine a conservationist stance with a development-oriented approach.
The conference in Rio in 1992, where local work on sustainable development was brought to the fore by the so-called Agenda 21, which was aimed to make sustainable development a genuine popular movement.
The Johannesburg summit in 2002, where Education for Sustainable Development and the schools' responsibility was put on the agenda as the Decade for Sustainable Development was launched, partly because local efforts to implement Agenda 21 had failed to live up to expectations.

At UNESCO's website, ESD is described as: "Education for sustainable development is a life-wide and lifelong endeavour which challenges individuals, institutions and societies to view tomorrow as a day that belongs to all of us, or it will not belong to anyone." ESD is, in other words, more than just school activities. According to the UNESCO, "the four major thrusts of education for sustainable development" are:

improving access to quality basic education;
reorienting existing education programmes;
developing public understanding and awareness;
providing training.

About Bjarne Bruun Jensen and Karsten Schnack
BruunJensen Bjarne Bruun Jensen is a professor at the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education, and he is the head of the Research Program for Environmental and Health Education. His research interests include 'Action and Participation as key concepts in environmental and health education' and 'Young people's concepts of health, inequality in health and action for health'.

See more at Bjarne Bruun Jensen's personal website.

Schnack Karsten Schnack is a professor at the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education, where he is affiliated to the Research Program for Environmental and Health Education. Among his research interests are didactics and formative theory, comparative didactics, environmental teaching and learning in relation to democracy, environmental education, health education and education for sustainable development.