The right climate for sustainability education
Today’s students are growing up in a time of growing concern about issues around sustainability and the green transition, including climate change and resource scarcity. How should students be taught about these issues? We spoke to Professor Nikolaj Elf about his research into how these topics are being addressed in Danish lower secondary schools.
The current generation of students are growing up in a time of heightened ecological awareness, and topics around sustainability and the green transition are increasingly prominent in school curricula across many countries. The 1987 Brundtland report (Our Common Future) on sustainable development played an important role in this respect, helping bring the green transition into the educational foreground. “The Brundtland report has become a central part of the educational paradigm on the green transition,” says Nikolaj Elf, a Professor in the Department of Design, Media and Educational Science at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). As Principal Investigator of a research project funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) and the Centre for Basic Education Research at SDU, Professor Elf is looking at how sustainability and the green transition are being addressed in Danish lower secondary schools, focusing on the perspectives of students, teachers and school leaders. “We want to go into classrooms and ask practiceoriented questions, such as; ‘what topics are teachers addressing in different subjects and across subjects? How are they doing it? Why are they doing it? And how are students responding to that?’” he outlines.
Ethnographic research
This represents a shift away from the previous more policy-driven, prescriptive approach, with the project team conducting ethnographic research in three Danish schools. These three have all been certified as schools with a heightened level of awareness about the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG), which might be expected to be reflected in teaching. “These three schools are strategically selected critical cases,” explains Professor Elf. Researchers are investigating teaching practice, and extensive fieldwork has been conducted by a PhD student and a post-doc. “They have been observing teaching across the whole range of subjects, and have interviewed both students and teachers. That has led on to different kinds of analysis and publications, which we have then used - in part at least - for preparing a quantitative
Interview with teacher Susanne School H, October 2021: One of the girls actually got upset at seeing the organs. We talked to her about it afterwards. She couldn’t describe her emotions in words, but she was upset. There was no warning, but she stood like that looking at it. It wasn’t because of the shock of seeing it and finding it disgusting. She just all of a sudden began to cry. think that it simply dawned on her that here was an animal that was dead. We talked to her afterwards and calmed her down. She came out and saw it again, and then thought: “Well, how’s it going?” She was the one who raised her hand to ask questions the most times and could also remember the most, and she was actually the one who wanted to go and touch it.
study, a so-called vignette study,” he continues. “This is a kind of survey, where you develop a short story describing a dilemma. You would then be asked questions about that dilemma, and asked to reach evaluations. For example, we’ve looked at how certain works of literature address biodiversity and the climate crisis. A poem has been selected that conveys a sense of optimism about the future, while another poem adopts a more dystopian tone that might be expected to evoke negative feelings and emotions.”
The next step was to look at the emotions and responses that these works generated.
“These qualitative and quantitative takes on the question of how, why and what we teach school students about the green transition and sustainability are at the core of the project,” says Professor Elf. The local environment may be an important factor in how teachers address the green transition and sustainability, a topic that Professor Elf and his colleagues are exploring in the project. “We have a case study about teachers in a rural school who have been teaching students about hunting and looking at the anatomy of the animal,” he outlines. “This is an interesting
illustration of how the local setting helps to shape the kinds of resources that teachers can draw on and use in their teaching, and also how that relates to aesthetic and affective aspects of teaching about sustainability and the green transition.” The wider aim in this research is to explore how schools are addressing the topic of sustainability, and how students are responding. While some students are deeply engaged in environmental topics, and are fired up by Greta Thunberg’s movement, others are not and take a far more sceptical stance. “Some groups of students say they are fed up of hearing about sustainability and the climate crisis,” acknowledges Professor Elf. Changes to teaching practice could shift the balance and heighten awareness of environmental issues, suggests Professor Elf. “We’re trying to challenge the basic rationale, the focus on classroom teaching and on acquiring particular kinds of knowledge. We would argue that there’s been too much focus on intellectual approaches to teaching about sustainability and biodiversity problems,” he says. “Instead, we’d like to see sustainability and the green transition taught in a more exploratory, inquiry-oriented, problembased way. That would seem to fit quite well with the big questions around sustainability and the climate crisis.”
Vignette 2 randomly tested school children’s affective reaction after reading poetry thematising nature. The dystopic poem (V1) had most positive effect on school children’s feeling of activation (red) and has the most negative effect on school children’s feeling of happiness (blue, p<0,01). The romantic poem (V3) had negative effect on activation and significantly positive effect on happiness (p<0,01). V2 was the reference vignette in between.
project is contributing to a broader system of generating new knowledge to inform future education policy, based on evidence from schools. “We’re doing this in a more empirically-grounded way than was perhaps the case in the past, where it was often quite theoretical, philosophical or prescriptive,” explains Professor Elf.
“We want to go into classrooms and ask concrete practiceoriented questions about teaching around sustainability and the green transition, such as; ‘what topics are we addressing in different subjects and across subjects? How are we doing it? Why are we doing it? And how are students responding to that?”
Teaching practice
This research could ultimately influence teaching practice, with Professor Elf having been asked to help rewrite the Danish curriculum for primary and lower-secondary (basic) education. Environmental issues are likely to be highlighted as one of the big challenges that should be addressed in all subjects, and the project’s findings will feed into the process, while Professor Elf and his team are also working with teachers in other parts of the education system. “We are organising conferences for teachers. The partnership for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is growing in Denmark, which has different branches, from daycare, to secondary education, right through to teacher education. We have funding now to develop learning materials for teacher education,” he outlines. In this sense the
GREEN TRANSITION IN LOWERSECONDARY EDUCATION
Green Transition in Lower-Secondary Education: A Mixed-Methods Study of Quality Teaching in Danish Schools
Project Objectives
The ambition of the project is to investigate how lower-secondary students and teachers experience the quality of teaching dealing with the green transition, and to develop new quality criteria. A conceptually clear elaboration of such criteria for quality teaching are needed to rectify the overly cognitive teaching style that dominates much contemporary green transition teaching.
Project Funding
The project is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Project Participants
• University of Southern Denmark (project partner) (lead)
• University College South Denmark (project partner)
• UCL University College (project partner)
• The Danish University of Education (project partner)
Contact Details
Principal Investigator, Professor Nikolaj Elf Faculty of Humanities
Department of Design, Media and Educational Science
University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK-5230 Odense M
T: +45 29 60 96 38
E: nfe@sdu.dk
W: www.sdu.dk/ansat/nfe
W: www.sdu.dk
W: https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/ center-for-grundskoleforskning
The project team is contributing to the literature, including a chapter for an edited volume on cross-curricula teaching, while Professor Elf is also working on a book about education and the green transition, together with researchers from across the world. With many countries (including Denmark) still far from meeting the emissions reductions targets set out in the Paris agreement of 2015, sustainability and the green transition are set to remain high on the agenda in the coming years, which will be reflected in education. “Goals around sustainability and the green transition have been inscribed in steering documents, for example for teacher education,” says Professor Elf. “We aim to contribute to the broader goal of making students more aware and knowledgeable about environmental problems in our society.”
Nikolaj Elf is Professor in educational sciences and head of Center for Basic Education Research at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, focusing on disciplinary/subject-specific didactics. Elf’s main research field is all aspects related to Language Arts /L1-education, focusing in particular on literature, writing, technology, multilingual education, and sustainability education. More broadly, he investigates big challenges for education on local school and systemic levels.
Professor Nikolaj Elf