Bridging environmental and sustainability education with critical global citizenship education: Exploring decolonial praxis with educators in Sweden

• In Event: Decolonial Perspectives on Environmental and Sustainability Education

Proposal

Relevance and context:
According to the Dublin Declaration on the need for a Global Education strategy in Europe, Global Education “enables people to reflect critically on the world and their place it in….to bring about a world of social and climate justice…” (GENE, 2022). Meanwhile, UNSDGs’ end date is fast approaching. In these final years, our project aims to contribute new knowledge on the successes and challenges UNSDG 4, Target 4.7 which includes two key UNESCO themes: Education for sustainable development (ESD)—focus on environmental sustainability—and global citizenship education (GCE)—focus on equity and justice through understandings interdependencies and responsibilities between local and global communities. These areas sit in different departments at UNESCO, draw on two main fields of research (among others)—GCE and environmental and sustainability education (ESE)—, and can be treated separately in research, policy, and practice.

Sweden has a strong tradition of work towards ESD in practice and in ESE in research; however, sparse literature has explored GCE in Sweden (Authors, 2023) despite researchers in ESE highlighting the political nature of environmental issues such as the climate crises (Sund & Öhman, 2014). Recent research has called for the bridging of these two fields of practice through critical GCE that explicitly takes up the role of on-going colonial systems of power in today’s global justice issues given the climate crises impacts most harshly those in the world least responsible for the carbon emissions underlying them (Authors 2019, 2020; Khoo & Jorgenson, 2021). This paper disseminates knowledge from a project that works with 15 experienced upper-secondary school teachers in Sweden to explicitly link critical GCE and ESE in order to examine the extent to which decolonial concepts can support their teaching of climate crises-related issues. We will a) present the conceptual underpinning, b) explain the project design, and c) discuss a set of emerging findings.

Theoretical and Conceptual framing:
The conceptual framework combines six key interrelated concepts to support and explore the pedagogical potential of combining critical GCE and ESE which we briefly outline here and in the presentation.

Shine/shadow of coloniality and modernity: Mignolo (2021) identifies how a logic of modernity – a shiny, positive contribution of modernity with its teleological narrative of progress, democracy, human rights and salvation can hide its darker side – coloniality – the violent systems of oppression on which modernity is built and complicit, such as colonialism, slavery, racism, heteropatriarchy, environmental exploitation (Mignolo, 2021). Making visible the shine and shadow as a fundamental dynamic underlying global relations is a key contribution of critical GCE (Andreotti, 2014).

Pedagogy of implication: Relatedly, Bryan (2022) argues any pedagogy seeking to address the climate emergency must “provoke learners to engage with the crisis from a position of non-innocence or self-implication” (338).

Nordic Exceptionalism: A prevailing view that Nordic countries have existed in periphery to colonialism and as they are the ‘more/most equal’ countries, they are innocent to and outside of implication in colonial systems of power that continue today requires challenging (Loftsdottir & Jensen, 2012).

Indigenous relationality: A further negation of the colonial relations of power underpins the treatment of indigenous communities living in Sápmi which spans across the north of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Educators can deeply consider indigenous ways of knowing and relations in treating climate issues.

Decolonial ecology: By outlining the double-fracture of the environment and coloniality, Ferdinand (2022) highlights how the urgency of the climate crises is intertwined with an urgency to dismantle colonial structures.

Response-ability: Speaking from within and counter to Eurocentric scientific traditions of knowledge production, Haraway (2016) explores the creative possibilities that come with ‘staying with the trouble’, in contextual and contingent responses to the current global emergencies those of us in the global North have inherited to which we actively contribute. Tying back to Bryan’s (2022) idea that a pedagogical of implication is an invitation to agency, how can we support agency amidst ethical complexity from a position of entangled and accountable existence through openness and responsiveness (Haraway, 2016)?

Mode of Inquiry:
The project aims to explore, design, and co-create with teachers an educational framework informed by concepts that link critical GCE and ESE while identifying opportunities, challenges, and constraints of/to such practice. 15 upper secondary school teachers in one region in Sweden (city, small town, rural based) participate in a series of 5 workshops over 3 years exploring and working through the six concepts, reflecting on practice, and co-creating resources. Researchers make school visits with reflexive interviews about applications to practice. We will present initial findings from a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) informed by colonial discourse analysis (Authors, 2023; Stein, 2018) of transcripts from participant discussions at the first three workshops (2023 and 2024). These focused on building a conceptual framework and sharing/reflecting on initial pedagogical applications. We consider: how do teachers experience working with decolonial perspectives and resources in their classroom practices? These findings will shape the final two workshops (in late 2024 and early 2025) where participants and researchers will co-produce a set of teacher resources to support wider take-up.

Emerging findings and contribution to research: The initial data analysis will occur during autumn 2024 and will be ready to present at CIES 2025. First readings of the workshop transcripts point to some overall thematic areas through which we anticipate we will organise our treatment of the findings. The workshop discussion transcriptions indicate important ways educators connected to the concepts in terms of a) their own understandings of the ethical complexities underpinning climate crises, b) reflections on their overall approach to teaching about these issues and the importance of education, c) specific applications in practice (e.g., activities, unit plans, materials), and d) developing a broader notion of relationality underpinning their approach to climate crisis education.

The paper offers a timely conceptual and empirical response to an on-going gap in literature and practice supporting SDG 4.7 across ‘global North’ contexts. It is original in both its combination of ESE and critical research and in exploring practical possibilities and challenges in the Swedish context.

Authors

• Karen Pashby, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Louise Sund

• Marta da Costa, Manchester Metropolitan University