‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

Ideland, Malin; Malmberg, Claes

doi:10.1080/17508487.2014.936890

Cited by 43 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Meanwhile, researchers should consider how portrayals of the causes, consequences, and potential responses to climate change also reflect or reinforce cultural biases and assumptions about who contributes to and addresses these problems across the globe (e.g., Ideland & Malmberg, ). Texts (including multimedia) may directly or indirectly address many questions, including the following: How does and how will GCC affect societies in different parts of the world?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global climate change in U.S. high school curricula: Portrayals of the causes, consequences, and potential responses

2018

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Broad misconceptions about global climate change (GCC) could hinder efforts to address this large‐scale problem, and curricular materials can play a substantial role in what students learn about GCC. This study examines how U.S. high school textbooks and supplemental curricular materials published between 2007 and 2012 portray the causes, consequences, and potential responses to GCC. Our data included text segments related to these topics in five science textbooks, four social studies textbooks, and eight sets of GCC supplemental materials. To analyze these text segments, we conducted several rounds of coding, first categorizing curricula by their acceptance of the human causes of GCC and then coding relevant text segments on several dimensions related to the consequences of and potential responses to GCC. Findings indicate that (1) about half the curricula portray human activity as a major cause of current climate change, (2) most curricula include information about climatic changes but few details about potentially proximal, near‐term impacts of GCC, and (3) most curricula offer a narrow set of strategies for responding to GCC. These findings suggest that educators should critically examine curricular materials they use to teach about GCC and that scholars should continually examine how GCC is portrayed to youth.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global climate change in U.S. high school curricula: Portrayals of the causes, consequences, and potential responses

2018

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“…In one article, they criticize ESD's good intentions of saving our common world as creating categories of Us and Them, which creates exclusions although the intention is to be inclusive. They claim that the textbooks construct Swedish exceptionalism, which makes ESD potentially both a colonial and exclusionary project (Ideland and Malmberg 2014). In another article (2015,175), they argue that the school materials construct the desirable child for sustainable development through pastoral power which "operates everywhere and through everyone," distancing ESD from governmental politics but making it well suited for the market economy's belief in the responsibilities and choices of the free subject.…”

Section: Research Context I: Education For Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidently, this is a definition that is open to interpretation, depending on, for example, how the present and future are understood, as well as what one includes in the notion of generations and in the notion of needs. The problem of defining sustainable development in practice has been discussed both in critical environmental research in general (see e.g., Bradley 2009;Alaimo 2012;Henriksson 2014) and in critical educational research in particular (see e.g., Bonnett 2002;Ideland and Malmberg 2014;Ideland and Malmberg 2015;Hasslöf 2015). Evidently, educational practice, with its raison d'être and historical trajectories, accentuates certain things as important while leaving others behind (see e.g., Gyberg 2003, 17-18).…”

Section: Sustainability and Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Michael Bonnett (2002) shows how sustainable development as a policy in education relates to ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects of our understandings of what it means to be human, and tends to be imagined within existing and taken-for-granted norms of what a good society is. The Swedish researchers Malin Ideland and Claes Malmberg (2014; have critically studied how ESD is discursively constructed in textbooks and other materials directed to Swedish schoolchildren. In one article, they criticize ESD's good intentions of saving our common world as creating categories of Us and Them, which creates exclusions although the intention is to be inclusive.…”

Section: Research Context I: Education For Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainability for Whom? : The Politics of Imagining Environmental Change in Education

Sjögren

2016

Linköping Studies in Arts and Sciences

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Global initiatives regarding environmental change have increasingly become part of political agendas and of our collective imagination. In order to form sustainable societies, education is considered crucial by organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. But how is the notion of sustainability imagined and formed in educational practices? What does sustainability make possible, and whom does it involve? These critical questions are not often asked in educational research on sustainability.This study suggests that the absence of critical questions in sustainability education is part of a contemporary post-political framing of environmental issues. In order to re-politicize sustainability in education, this study critically explores how education-as an institution and a practice that is supposed to foster humans-responds to environmental change. The aim is to explore how sustainability is formed in education, and to discuss how these formations relate to ideas of what education is, and whom it is for. This interdisciplinary study uses theories and concepts from cultural studies, feminist theory, political theory, and philosophy of education to study imaginaries of the unknown, nonhuman world in the context of education. The focus of the empirical investigation is on teacher education in Sweden, and more precisely on those responsible for teaching the future generations of teachers -the teacher instructors. With help from empirical findings from focus groups, the study asks questions about the ontological, political, and ethical potential and risk of bringing the unknown Other into education.

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“…The science knower is a future optimal citizen who performs as an individual, ongoingly facing challenges that 7 demand scientific competence and willing to engage in them (OECD, 2006, p. 20; c.f. Popkewitz, 2008;Ideland & Malmberg, 2014), and acts (as) within a scientific discourse/culture. A science-knower is:…”

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confidence: 99%

PISA truth effects: the construction of low performance

Serder

Ideland

2015

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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Countries with large numbers of students who struggle to master basic reading skills at age 15 are likely to be held back in the future, when those students become adults who lack the skills needed to function effectively in the workplace and in society. Among students who fail to reach the baseline level of performance (Level 2) in mathematics, reading or science, most can be expected not to continue with education beyond compulsory schooling, and therefore risk facing difficulties using mathematics, reading and using science concepts throughout their lives … Even in the average OECD country, where more than one in five students does not reach Level 2, tackling such low performance is a major challenge. (OECD, 2013, p. 254, our emphases in italics)Keywords: performance; competency; PISA; students; STS; scientific literacy This quote is from an OECD publication that reports the results from the 2012 PISA survey, on which the above analysis is based. The Swedish PISA results from that year were the lowest ever in all three knowledge areas at stake, which shocked the nation. Since low performance on the PISA is put forward as serious personal and societal risks, this concern is expected. In December 2013, the Swedish results were broadcast directly from a press conference held at the National Agency of Education. The message was that the results were very serious, overwhelming, and signaled a school system in crisis. During the press conference, Director-General Anna Ekström also emphasized her confidence in PISA: 'Here at the National Agency for Education, we trust PISA' (Ekström, 3 December 2013). Through this broadcast, and massive media reporting, the crisis of the Swedish school system became publicly indisputable. Although we share the view that many things probably would be in place to strengthen Swedish schools, we find this type of unreserved faith in PISA as evidence of educational failure or success, to be problematic. In this article, we make an attempt to unpack what we would term the taken-for-granted notion of low performance. Using the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault (1971), and particularly Bruno Latour's (1999) STS studies, our main thesis is that low performance is not a given category, but a reality performed into being by students, test instruments, and measurement rationality.In the global structure of education, understanding what important knowledge 'is', and what could be its missing parts, has become a grand narrative of our time, with help from the idea of a globalized educational system (Novóa, 2013). Actors in the global education market (or rather, instigators at the Organisation for Economic Co- * Email: margareta.serder@mah.se 2 operation and Development [OECD], the European Commission, the World Bank, and UNESCO (Grek, 2009; Lawn & Grek, 2012;Morgan, 2009) for international assessments such as PISA are constructing the standards for what is a successful student or a successful nation.However, the role of PISA deviates from other assessments in that it constitutes the very in...

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‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

Cited by 43 publications

References 18 publications

Global climate change in U.S. high school curricula: Portrayals of the causes, consequences, and potential responses

Global climate change in U.S. high school curricula: Portrayals of the causes, consequences, and potential responses

Sustainability for Whom? : The Politics of Imagining Environmental Change in Education

PISA truth effects: the construction of low performance

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