Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In the international policy debate, environmental education and education for sustainable development seem to be moving away from a focus on behavioural modifications to more pluralistic approaches. This article illuminates a Swedish example of a strategic interplay between evaluation, development and research that relates to this shift, involving actors from schools, governmental agencies and researchers. The specific purpose of the research was to analyse and describe teachers' attempts to stimulate a pluralistic meaning-making process among their students in the context of education for sustainable development. The empirical material consisted of video-recorded lessons in secondary and upper secondary schools. In the analysis we used a methodological approach based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein's firstperson perspective on language. A concept called 'epistemological moves' has been used to clarify the actions that teachers perform in order to guide students in procedures of meaning-making. The analysis shows that the teachers perform a number of actions that make pluralistic meaning-making possible: encouraging the students to compare, specify, generalise and test their arguments under different circumstances. The teachers also encouraged the students to examine and evaluate different alternatives and be critical of their own statements. Finally, the findings are related to a perspective of democracy as a form of life.