15. september 2009 af ibje

Polar bears on melting ice flakes. Dried-out rivers and drought-stricken fields. Devastating hurricanes that destroy countless homes. We are all familiar with the terrifying images of a world struck by violent and wide-ranging climate change. This is a world many of us believe we must learn to live in, because we have not yet found the solutions to the climate crisis.



How can we learn to live in a less predictable world - and with the consequences of climate changes?
"Education plays a key role in relation to the climate," says Professor Jeppe Læssøe from the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University. Or rather: Education ought to play a key role as a mediator of a societal learning process about sustainable development, but this is not the case today.

"The importance of education is often overlooked. Maybe people think of the individual in relation to the climate, but if so, only in terms of communication: the population must be informed about this or that," Professor Læssøe says.

"Everything seems to indicate that we will have to live with major climate changes and that we will experience 'rolling' effects of the changes. We already see the first changes in the production patterns of basic foods, for instance in Southern Africa, which would be a fertile area expect for the lack of water. If the region should experience even worse droughts, we face a huge task in transforming production and welfare in that society."

According to Professor Læssøe, there is little sense in working for sustainable development without factoring in education. Sustainable development is always 'Education for Sustainable Development'.

However, the key issue in Education for Sustainable Development is not natural disasters, nor rising sea levels. It is the 'rolling effect' that climate changes have on our social systems: the conflicts it will lead to between nations and between regions. "Environmental problems are conflicts of interest between different groups. We must possess the commitments and the competence to develop solutions as the problems evolve," he says.

Ten countries' experiences
The question is what kind of role the educational system should play in a world struggling with climate change. This is a key concern for the think tank International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes, and not least for Jeppe Læssøe, who is the leader of the think tank's interdisciplinary research project on Education for Sustainable Development.

The ten members of the Alliance have each appointed a team of researchers to map the status of ESD in their respective countries. Experiences from each of the ten members, spread out across six continents, will form the basis of a comparative analysis that will result in a global 'state of the art' for ESD. In late 2009, the project will conclude with a series of policy recommendations concerning how to support ESD, both locally and globally.

The reason for the think tanks to do this work now is that we are in the middle of the UN's Decade for Education and Sustainable Development (2005-2014) - but obviously also because climate changes have become a hot topic for politicians and for the people, Professor Læssøe explains.

"If, for instance, you ask people in Denmark to rank political issues, climate change is rated higher than both unemployment and social security. Three out of four Danes are 'very' or 'somewhat' concerned about climate change. Just five years ago, the climate was barely on the agenda."

It is quite a different story for Education for Sustainable Development, but the UN's Decade has generated some political interest. This is evident in the state of the art-reports from each of the ten alliance members.

"It is striking how ten different countries from very different areas of the world follow the same discourse about climate and environment in their political strategies. The UN's discourse on ESD has certainly had an impact on national policy-documents in the ten countries. The question is of course what impact there has been in practice, and that we know very little about," Professor Læssøe says.

From hype to practice
Professor Læssøe points out that there are indications of an imbalance between how much ESD appears in national policy claims and how little ESD there actually is in the world's educational institutions.

"At the moment we have this absurd discrepancy between the lofty ambitions and ideals concerning ESD and the minimal role it plays in practice."

When the ten research teams sum up the status for ESD, there are a vast number of national and international strategies and policies to write about, but very little to put in the reports about real, practical implementation in schools.

One nation which is ahead of the others in terms of implementing the grandiose political statements is Australia: "Australia has taken the lead here. They are years ahead of the rest of the members. Way back in 2000 they formulated a strategy for ESD, they have an action plan in place and they are carrying out the plan already," says Professor Læssøe.

One area where Denmark is lagging behind Australia and other countries is in ESD in the universities.

"There is so much international attention to this field, but very, very little in the Danish universities. This is not just about putting timers on coffee machines to turn them off at night. This is about giving highly educated employees the competencies they need to manage and facilitate sustainable development."

A gap between politics and research
Despite national differences all ten member countries follow the same discourse about climate and environment in their political strategies. Another common trait is, according to Professor Læssøe, that all ten countries have the same arguments and controversies about the practical implementation of ESD. The reason is that the concept is claimed and defined by two radically different realms.

"ESD is a concept with a wide range of meanings, but there is a world of difference between how politicians and environmentalists on the one hand and people in the educational sector on the other view ESD. Politicians will usually say something about changing behaviour and about informing the populations about technical solutions. People in the educational sector, on the other hand, will talk about the need for basic competencies to handle societal challenges."

The fear of simplification
A nother shared trait between the alliance members is the risk of turning ESD into an independent process with the aim to promote a scientific understanding of what climate change is all about. In the American report, for instance, 'climate change education' is described as a new concept and the concept is taken to mean that we must teach children, and for that matter adults too, "about the scientific understanding of global climate change".

According to Professor Læssøe, this is a simplistic approach. ESD calls for a broader interpretation to succeed, and it must not be reduced to yet another subject in school:

"There is reason to fear that the concept is reduced to a matter of purely factual scientific communication or suggestions for behavioural change to the public," he says.

"The meritocracy in the environmental sector have developed a desire to inform the people about the solutions that are available. The way natural sciences produce solutions is typically to first identify some sort of problem in nature, then come up with a solution and then inform the population. This is a technocratic and fairly instrumental approach, which means that solutions are communicated to the people, who then have to implement them."

Professor Læssøe explains that the technocratic approach contradicts the way pedagogics think about ESD. In pedagogical terms, ESD means to facilitate an improvement of people's competencies and capacity to deal with problems. In this paradigm, the role of education is not to inject specific political or technological solutions.

"It can be problematic if education is set up to carry through a certain policy. The educational sector maintains that sustainable development is not a given; it is a learning process for society in general, and the educational institutions must facilitate and qualify that learning process," Jeppe Læssøe explains.

"ESD - or education in general - is impossible if people are thought of as robots that are susceptible to reprogramming. Of course society must develop mores and norms. The role of education is partly to shed light on these norms and mores, and partly to allow the individual to develop competencies for critical reflection."

The uncertain knowledge of the risk society
One reason why it is becoming more and more important to go further than simple transfer of knowledge is that the last four decades have shown a global development that fundamentally questions the role of education. Jeppe Læssøe explains:

"The logic of the educational system has been that we can transmit and teach children knowledge that we know is true, i.e. about what is true and what is false, and about how to implement that knowledge. In the risk society, we face a new challenge, and that is to learn how to deal with uncertain knowledge. We can no longer, as we used to, separate knowledge into separate disciplines, each with a core of certain knowledge. It suddenly becomes crucial to be able to grasp complexity and interactions. This challenges the way we design educations, both in terms of form and content."

This accentuates, for instance, the entire issue of cross-disciplinarity. "Should education about the environment and the climate still be something unique, separate from other topics? Should it still be something that we address for one week a year at school, or should it be integrated into the regular curriculum and the way the schools work?" Professor Læssøe asks rhetorically - and replies that the integrated model makes the most sense.

Learning about sustainable development is in itself a huge undertaking, one with a lot of erroneous information, dilemmas and high degree of complexity. The big challenge for the risk society is that it is very difficult to motivate people to get engaged and to change their behaviour based on some very unpleasant threats. Risks are, by their very nature, threats. We know from risk research that people have two basic responses to a challenging dilemma: To browse through our toolbox for appropriate countermeasures we can implement, or, if that does not help, to deny or redefine the problem at hand, Jeppe Læssøe explains.

"And if you look at how the media present the climate challenge, the two approaches are obvious. You could say that the progress of the entire anti-environment movement has partly been due to a strong desire for the climate problems to simply not exist."

Collective self-delusion
More and more people think of the climate crisis as 'An Inconvenient Truth', with the former American vice president Al Gore and his movie and book at the front. This is why we go through our toolbox for possible ways to promote a sustainable development. But are we doing enough? According to Jeppe Læssøe, there is a very real danger that we fall prey to the shared delusion that we are all doing a lot of things for the environment, while we are not, in fact, taking any significant steps towards a sustainable world.

"If we all claim to act; if governments say they are taking decisive action, if the corporate sector uses advertising to tell us how much they have improved because gasoline is now 5% organic, if we as private individuals do something, we can all go around telling each other that we are adopting change, but this might very well be a fantasy, a collective self-delusion, which actually obscures the fact that we are failing to incorporate sufficient changes."

The question is, however, is it enough? The unpleasant answer is that there is no one at the helm.

"There are no objective judges, not even the UN," says professor Læssøe, "but research can play the role of the critical friend. Research plays a vital role in constantly improving our understanding of what must be done. We need more in the way of dialogue between the experts and people's preconceptions, in order to produce solutions in a collaboration. Educations ought to play a key role in this process - but this is not the case at present," Jeppe Læssøe concludes.

In late 2009, the International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes will publish their views on how educations can help to stop the rolling effects of climate changes, and contribute to pave the way for a sustainable future.

By Camilla Mehlsen cme@dpu.dk

 

Jeppe Læssøe is Professor at DPU, Aarhus University. He is the leader of the research project 'Climate Change and Sustainable Development - the Response from Education' which is set up by the International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes. He is the chairman of the Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy's climate panel, which was set up to produce recommendations for future specific measures related to sustainable development in society.


Favourite book about climate change?
"Climate change has been debated in mass medias for decades. I will recommend to follow this debate rather than a specific book."


What is the biggest challenge for climate change education in Denmark?
"In my opinion climate change education should be approached as an integrated part of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The biggest challenge in my country is that climate change education is promoted in a situation where ESD in not yet established in the educational sector. It implies a risk that it will be reduced to science information and moralistic campaigns for individual behavioral change," Professor Jeppe Læssøe says.