Essential and/or Disingenuous: Exploring the relationship between decolonial praxis and ‘taking action’ with Swedish upper secondary school teachers

• In Event: Opportunity, Appropriation, and Risk: Illuminating the Shifting Relations Between History and Citizenship Education

Proposal

Relevancy: Starting with the new school year in August 2018 in Sweden, then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg spent each Friday outside the Swedish Parliament with her sign “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (school strike for climate). Millions of inspired youth world-wide organised their own school strikes. In February 2023, continuing to protest various issues related to the climate emergency and together with members of Sami communities, she accused the Norwegian government of ‘green colonialism’ due to their placements of wind generators and argued climate transition could not take place “at the expense of indigenous people’s rights” (Milne, 2023). Thunberg demonstrates that meaningful protest in relation to the climate emergency requires youth to consider deep connections of historical and present-day colonial systems of power. Against the backdrop of this very famous Swedish youth activist, our project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, considers how a group of Swedish upper secondary school teachers who teach across subject areas engage with decolonial concepts in their teaching of global issues. Drawing on decolonial praxis (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) for ethical global issues pedagogy (Authors, 2020), our CIES presentation will respond to the sub-question raised in the CfP: What pedagogies might our education institutions and sets of classrooms embrace that enable the development of capacities to act?

Context and Theory: In today’s context of interdependent global challenges, education for sustainable development (ESD) and global citizenship education (GCE) are two key planks of UNESCO’s work towards the Sustainable Development Goal 4 Target 7. Yet, the teaching of ethical global issues in ‘Global North’ contexts often creates an ‘us’ who solves the problems of a ‘them’ in the ‘Global South’ (Andreotti, 2012). Recent scholarship highlights how ESD and GCE are implicated in colonial relations of power and argues for a closer bridging of critical scholarship across ESD and GCE (Khoo & Jorgenson, 2021; “Author”, 2020; Swanson & Gamal, 2021). Researchers in both fields warn that forms of denial constrain critical work in education (e.g. Lysgaard, 2019; Stein et al., 2022). Andreotti (2021) identifies four social sanctioned denials embedded in conditions created by colonialism that require interruption through education: 1) systemic violence (exploita-tion, expropriation), 2) ecological unsustainability, 3) the condition of entanglement/relationality and 4) the extent and depth of the multiple problems faced by humanity (146; cf “Author”, 2023).

Research shows teachers lack time and resources to engage more deeply with global issues in the classroom and develop pedagogical approaches that challenge Eurocentric onto-epistemological dominance (see “Author”, 2021). The bulk of pedagogical innovation around decolonial approaches occurs in settler contexts and less so in Europe. Further, calls for formal education to support students to ‘take action’ and ‘make a difference’ are both pressing given the climate emergency and possibly disingenuous, as Tarc (2015) argues. He suggests the most coherent outcome of active global citizenship education should be an anchor of openness to engage in the world reflectively (53). A key point of reflexivity is Bryan’s (2022) imperative for a ‘pedagogy of implicatedness’. She argues any pedagogical framework for comprehensive treatment of the climate emergency must “provoke learners to engage with the crisis from a position of non-innocence or self-implication and must serve as an ‘invitation to human agency’ to respond (otherwise) to the crisis” (338).

Inquiry: Our project engages 15 upper secondary school teachers in Sweden of various subjects from four schools who are interested in exploring decolonial perspectives in teaching of global justice issues. Over three school years, we aim to explore, design, and co-create with teachers an educational framework informed by decolonial perspectives and rooted in the realities of classrooms. The project has three interlocking stages. Stage one looks at opportunities and constraints at the school level (data sets: transcriptions of 4 semi-structured interviews with 2-4 teachers at each of the four schools + transcriptions of mixed group discussions of early thematic findings). Stage two is a series of 5 workshops where researchers introduce different decolonial concepts and existing resources and teachers react to the inputs, share their work, and plan ideas to apply in practice. Later workshops involve co-drafting resources (data sets: transcriptions of teacher discussions, photos of group work, scans of planning ideas). Stage three involves classroom visits to observe teacher practice (data sets: observation notes and transcript of reflexive interview with teachers).

In this paper at CIES, we will share some findings from Stages 1 and 2. We use thematic analysis where we first describe key themes emerging the data across three researchers’ interpretations and share these with participants to discuss. We finalise the themes and consider key points of analysis through the decolonial praxis framework of the project. In this paper, we review emergent themes and raise a specific question “in what ways do decolonial pedagogies as applied by these teachers in their classrooms enable reflexive capacities to act?”.

Findings: In initial/early analysis of the focus groups, we find teachers are grappling with how to pedagogically engage with responsibility to take action while recognising the need for systemic change and being appropriate to students’ actual sphere of influence. Furthermore, teachers indicate it is easier to teach facts on subject content as criticality and to see different perspectives requires more preparation and takes time though they do find ways. Teachers themselves must have a complex understanding to pedagogically respond to issues students raise in class in relation to the material and this group is interested in developing this area of their praxis. At CIES we will be able to share some emerging themes from the beginning of stage two where we will explore more deeply how teachers can mitigate these tensions and support decolonial praxis.

Contribution: Our project presents an opportunity to respond to concerns in research and challenges expressed by teachers in the next stages of the project where we continue to connect conceptual resources from decolonial theory with the expertise of these teachers. The paper will thus contribute a conceptual nuance, based on our empirical findings, of the tensions between the push for action and the need for deep reflexivity.

Authors

• Karen Pashby, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Louise Sund

• Asgeir Tryggvason, Örebro University