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Environmental Education Research
ISSN: 1350-4622 (Print) 1469-5871 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceer20
More of the same: A critical analysis of the
formations of teacher students through education
for sustainable development
Hanna Sjögren
To cite this article: Hanna Sjögren (2019): More of the same: A critical analysis of the formations of teacher students through education for sustainable development, Environmental Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2019.1675595
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1675595
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Published online: 17 Oct 2019.
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More of the same: A critical analysis of the formations of
teacher students through education for sustainable
development
Hanna Sj€ogrenDepartment of Children, Youth and Society, Malm€o University, Malm€o, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Despite the good intentions in policies promoting education for sustain-able development (ESD), this paper shows that, as university scholars and teachers, we need to critically engage with how student subjectiv-ities are formed when global initiatives materialise in local educational practices. The analysis in this paper is based on focus groups with teacher instructors in Sweden, where the participants discuss how they work with education for sustainable development. The analysis focuses on how the teacher instructors discuss their students. The analysis shows that the preferred teacher student has an active lifestyle, partici-pates in public debates, is happy, and consumes eco-friendly goods, often in line with the teacher instructors themselves. In conclusion, the author argues that those engaging with education for sustainable development should seek to widen its scope by critically engaging with how those under education are formed through taken for granted norms of good intentions and education for sustainable development in the present.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2 April 2019 Accepted 18 September 2019
KEYWORDS
Education for sustainable development (ESD); teacher education; good intentions; subjectivity; focus groups
Introduction
Formal education is often understood as important for achieving sustainability and a sustainable development (UNESCO 2017 see also e.g. Gough and Scott 2008; Huckle and Wals 2015). Currently, we can see how goals about sustainable development and education intersect, with wide consequences for what a society expects education to achieve (see e.g. N. Lindgren and €Ohman 2018; Ideland 2019; Holfelder 2019). Higher education institutions and programmes are considered important for achieving a sustainable development (Jickling and Wals 2002; Anna Reid and Petocz 2006; Hallinger and Chatpinyakoop 2019). Clearly, how teachers handle issues related to sustainable development in the classrooms of both compulsory education and higher education is of great importance (Corney and Reid2007; Campbell and Robottom2008; Gough and Scott 2008; Evans et al. 2017). As such, teacher education can be considered particularly interesting for studying how sustainable development is interpreted in education. This article focuses on Swedish teacher instructors’ conversations about their students while they are
CONTACTHanna Sj€ogren hanna.sjogren@mau.se Department of Children, Youth and Society, Malm€o universitet, 205
06 Malm€o, Sweden
ß 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
grappling with the notion of sustainable development in education. Teacher instructors are those who teach matters related to a sustainable development to future teachers.
The Swedish Higher Education Act (SFS 1992:1434 my translation from Swedish) states that universities in Sweden shall “support a sustainable development that ensures that present and future generations are guaranteed a healthy and good environment, economic and social wel-fare, and equity.” Teacher students need to, by the time of graduation, “show the ability to make pedagogical assessments based on [… ] a sustainable development” (SFS 1993:100 my transla-tion from Swedish). The Swedish school curriculum emphasizes sustainable development several times, both as general objective and as subject-specific objectives (Lgr112011). Since sustainable development is put forward in the curriculum as well as in the demands on future teachers, there are several reasons as to why future generations of teachers need to both become familiar with this notion during their teacher training, and to handle it in their future teaching. However, and this is a crucial point for the present study, how sustainable development comes to be teachable still seems to be an open question worthy of study.
This article focuses on how university teachers partake in the formation of future schoolteach-ers. How teacher instructors construct the teacher students creates ways of envisioning who it is that can become knowledgeable in education for sustainable development. These constructions form what the student is expected to know about sustainability before, during, and after gradu-ating from studies at a teacher education program. This article critically attends to how educa-tion takes part in forming teachers and future citizens by investigating the formaeduca-tions of future teachers in teacher education for sustainable development.
The aim of this paper is to critically investigate how teacher instructors contribute to the for-mation of future teachers in relation to goals about sustainable development in education. Two research questions are asked: 1) How are desirable future teachers formed by teacher instructors through focus group conversations? 2) How are the teacher instructors’ formations of teacher students related to ideas about the purpose of education?
What is being sustained in education for sustainable development?
This article draws on previous critical research on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Although policies promoting education for sustainable development sets out with seemingly good intentions, several scholars within the educational field show that these intentions can lead to practices that reinforce unequal power relations (see e.g. Jickling and Wals2008; Hellberg and Knutsson2018; Ideland2019; Holfelder2019). As pointed out by Alan Reid (2002, 76), sustainable development “does not arrive fully formed in the classroom, it is shaped and influenced by a range of discourses”. This means that we need to attend to how education for sustainable devel-opment is formed in practices. Jo-Anne Ferreira (2009) argues for the importance of reflecting on what academics take for granted in educational thought and practice. Previous critical research can be divided into two main areas: 1) Scholars who critique the foundations of education for sustainable development (see e.g. Jickling and Wals2008; Dahlbeck2014; Ideland and Malmberg
2014;2015; Huckle and Wals 2015; Hellberg and Knutsson 2018; T. Lindgren2018; Ideland2019; Holfelder2019) and 2) Scholars who are critical of recent interpretations of ESD, but who seek to enhance and improve ESD as an educational project (see e.g. Selby 2006; Kopnina 2014, 2016; Sund and €Ohman 2014; Poeck, Goeminne, and Vandenabeele 2016; Poeck 2018; Poeck and €Ostman2018; N. Lindgren and €Ohman2018). This paper primarily draws on the former area and contributes to a critique of the implicit ideas in education for sustainable development.
Previous critical research has focused on how ESD contributes to the formation of sustainable or green subjectivities, which is in line with the scope of this paper. Malin Ideland (2019, 4) anal-yses how desirable“eco-certified” children are normatively constructed through ESD. In Ideland’s analysis, children’s subject positions are formed through expectations of what they should feel
and how they should act when being educated for a sustainable development. Sofie Hellberg and Beniamin Knutsson (2018) propose a biopolitical analysis of how ESD consolidates different subjectivities for wealthy and poor people globally. Drawing on examples from observations of how sustainable development is taught in Sweden and Rwanda, Hellberg and Knutsson find that the Swedish students were encouraged to make sustainable lifestyle choices in terms of con-sumption, while the Rwandan students were taught things such as rainwater harvesting and gar-dening. In Hellberg and Knutsson’s (2018, 98) conclusion, education for sustainable development offers different subjectivities to different students which means that the students are“governed in different ways for entirely different life-trajectories”. They argue that interpretations of sustain-able development partake in the formation of subjectivities, but they point out that these forma-tions are likely to be different in different educational and geopolitical contexts. Hellberg and Knutsson suggest that what is being sustained in education for sustainable development is a glo-bal divide between the wealthy and the poor.
Moreover, Anne-Katrin Holfelder (2019, 950) argues that ESD, as a worldwide educational cam-paign,“sustains a problematic non-sustainable notion of society”. Holfelder points out that ESD, on the one hand, promotes the idea of an open and sustainable future through education and, on the other hand, directs education in particular, closed way in order to achieve sustainability. Holfelder (2019, 949) argues that education in terms of sustainability needs to build on an open-ness towards the future and on acceptance of the limits of education. However, she admits that it is “questionable whether this idealized demand is possible within Western school systems or even within a society grounded on many non-sustainable patterns”.
In John Huckle and Arjen E.J Walsh’s (2015, 492) review of the literature that supported the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, they condemn that the program “failed through inadequate guidance, misplaced idealism or the censoring of more critical ideas and content, to face up to current global realities”. In other words, the policies promoting ESD have sustained the system causing an unsustainable development.
Insights from previous research show that it is vital to address critical questions in relation to the global educational project of ESD. The research presented above concentrates on critical educational scholarship in relation to ESD and shows why it is crucial to ask critical questions to the implicit ideas in education for sustainable development. The question of what is being sus-tained in ESD has consequences for real life experiences and possibilities in education. How teacher instructors form certain types of subjectivities though educational practices in relation to sustainable development is therefore an important question to ask for a critical scholarship on sustainable development.
Theorizing the formation of future teachers’ subjectivities
The theoretical framework in this paper stems from a poststructuralist understanding of subject-ivity. From a poststructuralist perspective, subjectivity can be seen as produced through dis-course (Gregson and Rose2000). In this paper, subjectivity is understood in line with Donald E. Hall (2004, 3–4) as a concept that “invites us to consider the question of how and from where identity arises, to what extent it is understandable, and to what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence or control”. Unlike identity, Hall clarifies that subjectiv-ity signifies an analytical level for considering the tension between agency and determinism in forming who we are. The scope of this paper is not to discuss the notion of subjectivity in detail, but to outline the theoretical notion of subjectivity to analyse the discussions in the focus groups with teacher instructors.
In this paper, I draw on poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler’s (1997; 1999) notion of subjectivity. According to Butler (1999), social identities are constructed though social processes and subjectivity is, in the understanding of Butler, linguistically performed through repetition.
Butler’s conceptualization is used to trace the linguistic formation of subjectivity in relation to future teachers of sustainable development. The conversations analysed in this paper both use and challenge discourses that produce subjectivities for future teachers. The conversations ana-lysed here take place in focus groups.
Moreover, subjectivity in Butler’s understanding is closely related to the notion of performativ-ity “the citational practices which reproduce and/or subvert discourses and which enable and discipline subjects and their performances” (Gregson and Rose 2000, 434). Teacher instructors perform subjectivity in their discussions about education for sustainable development. Butler (1997, 83) makes a point about the duplicity of subjectivation, it is both about“the becoming of the subject” and “the process of subjection”. This paper leans on the understanding of subjectiv-ity as the process of subjection to understand and analyse the focus group conversations with teacher instructors.
The discussions analysed in this paper focus on the formation of teacher students in relation to sustainable development and education. The discussions are viewed as sites where subjectiv-ities are linguistically performed, both for selves and others. I focus on how the teacher instruc-tors discuss their students as a way of performing, enabling, and restricting subjectivities in teacher education in relation to sustainable development.
Material and method
Teacher instructors are given a central responsibility for educating future generations of teachers. This position permits reflection on the purpose of teaching and education.
The material in this article is drawn from a focus group study on how sustainable develop-ment is handled in Swedish teacher education (Sj€ogren 2016). The research design with focus groups was initially chosen to study how teacher instructors collectively form their understand-ing of teachunderstand-ing in relation to goals about sustainable development.
A total of 34 teacher instructors from eight universities around Sweden participated in the focus groups. One focus group was held at each university and a total of eight focus groups were conducted. The focus group literature suggests that the ideal group size is between 4 and 8 people, and that each focus group may last 1–2 hours (Kitzinger 1995). At least 3–4 groups should be conducted to determine data saturation (Krueger and Casey 2014). Each focus group in the present study consisted of 3–6 participants and the duration of the focus groups was 80–105 minutes. One group comprised of three participants, due to a last-minute cancellation by the fourth participant. The participants came from a range of disciplines and areas such as social science, science, pedagogy, early childhood education, geography, mathematics, technology edu-cation, and science education. Participants were found by first recruiting at least one teacher instructor per university. Each recruited participant then referred to other potential participants, creating a so-called“snowball sample” (Bryman 2016, 415). Some of the participants knew each other beforehand and some met for the first time at the occasion of the focus groups.
When presenting quotes from the focus groups, only fictive names are used and details that could reveal the identity of the participants were removed during the transcription process. All par-ticipants have been informed of the aim of the study and have given consent to participate in the study. The focus groups were all recruited, organized, conducted, and analysed by the author.
The interview guide used during the focus groups was prepared based on the idea of using the focus groups as relatively open forums for teacher instructors to discuss and elaborate on the handling of sustainable development in teacher education. The guide was structured around three main themes: Teacher education’s relevance to sustainable development, experiences of sustainable development in teacher education, and knowledge and sustainable development. The moderator introduced the topics but was otherwise not intervening in the discussions, unless the discussions were running out. The interaction between the participants was for most parts driving the discussions.
Focus groups can be seen as having an “intensely social nature” (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2013, 40) which, in this case, have been utilized to enable collective conversations in the groups. Focus groups can let participants question each other, allowing group dynam-ics to take the discussion in unexpected directions (Barbour and Kitzinger 1999). The inter-view design was deliberately open to enable “collective conversations that can emerge when interactions between research and research participants are not prefigured but emergent” (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2013, 54–55). The analyses in this article are based on how the teacher instructors discuss their students. The topic concerning the students was not intro-duced by the moderator but emerged through the conversations in all focus groups. When coding the focus groups a software which is specially designed for qualitative data was used. The software was used to create a descriptive overview and mapping of the interview scripts. Repeated listening to the audio recordings as well as repeated readings of the tran-script led the focus to “sensitive moments” in the interviews (Kitzinger and Farquhar quoted in Wibeck, Abrandt Dahlgren, and €Oberg 2007, 259). In line with Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2013, 51) the analysis was directed to drawing out “complexities, nuances, and contra-dictions”. In this paper, three different principles have been used to map complexities, nuan-ces, and contradictions: 1) Identification and analysis of the positioning of us against them, which is where one or several of the participants refer to problematic subjectivities that are not fitting into their understanding of sustainable development, 2) Identification and analysis of resistance, and disagreement, which is when the participants seem provoked, or try to provoke each other, or when they resist dominating formations of sustainable development in the groups, and 3) Identification and analysis of when the participants are defining a prob-lem and then finding a solution to the probprob-lem. This analysis resulted in two main themes in which teacher student subjectivities were constructed and formed through the focus group conversations. These themes are presented below.
Teacher student subjectivities as active and happy consumers
The focus group conversations regarding the teacher students include a number of suggested activities and behaviours that the teacher instructors ascribe to both their desirable and undesir-able students. In many cases, there seems to be a significant difference between how the teacher students are perceived to be and how the teacher instructors think they ought to be. The focus group conversations display that the students are expected to engage in a number of activities, events, and organizations; for instance, they are expected to participate in public debates and public demonstrations, to be involved in NGOs and in their university’s student union, to hike, consume recycled or used clothing, travel abroad, listen to non-commercial radio stations, and so on. All of these activities and behaviours contribute to constructions of teacher students as subjects who do certain things, behave in and feel certain ways. Civic engagement and an active lifestyle are particularly hailed, but also challenged, in the focus groups.
A domain of particular importance for the active student in the focus group discussions seems to be the domestic sphere, where some of the teacher instructors expect the students to be both knowledgeable and behave in certain ways. In the following quote, an active lifestyle through consumption, and more specifically, the consumption of certain clothes, is brought up and related to the students:
Solveig: but they are surprisingly ignorant, and I have tried to keep up with what is offered in terms of alternatively produced clothes and so on.
Sebastian: mm-hmm
Sofia and Sebastian: no
[… ]
Solveig: but anyway H&M has a new collection of recycled polyester
Sofia and Sebastian: mm-hmm
Solveig: which wasn’t that expensive Sebastian: okay
Solveig’s definition of what it means to be active in terms of sustainable development becomes equivalent to knowing which clothes to consume in this quote; it involves consuming and behaving in certain ways. What might be going on here is that the informed teacher instructors – such as Solveig– are held up as the norm to which the students are compared. An idea of sameness, that is, the idea that the teacher students should be like their teachers and behave as they do, seems present here. Furthermore, the act of consumption itself is left unproblematized. In this way, the knowledge-able student becomes someone who knows what is out there to consume in terms of mass-produced organic clothing. A consuming student becomes a legitimate figure of sustainable development.
However, Solveig, who explicitly criticized the students on many occasions during the focus group interview she participated in, also admits that it is hard to participate as a political citizen when it is difficult to grasp the far-reaching consequences of one’s actions:
Solveig: [… ] that we are connected to each other in this net that is so difficult to control, so difficult to understand [… ] there is new evidence every day about how hard it is to handle the role of being a consumer, to be a political citizen
Clearly, there are also ways of understanding the students’ situation that counter the view of students as particularly ignorant. It is essential to note the connection Solveig makes between being a consumer and a citizen in order to understand how students sometimes come to be constructed as particularly uncomfortable and problematic subjectivities in education for sustain-able development. When the global project of education for sustainsustain-able development describes consumption as the legitimate way of acting sustainable and of being a citizen, students may indeed be seen as a problematic group. It is worth pointing out that students as a group often have limited economic resources and may not be able to enter the subjectivities of the citizen consumer, by consuming expensive eco-friendly products.
The consumption of clothes as a legitimate site of participation was also brought up and pro-blematized in other focus groups. Below, one of the focus group participants, Gunnar, critically questions lifestyle choices as the solution to environmental problems:
Gunnar: at the same time there is a rather frequent tendency to make this about personal lifestyle issues so to speak, so that we encumber our students, so that they in turn will encumber their students, with having to make the right choice, and in doing that we are in some way disavowing the whole system, what you talked about before, what actually makes it so difficult, there is almost nothing to choose from that is good.
Gunnar voices the difficulty of being faced with having to choose between bad alternatives. Gunnar’s doubts about requiring teacher students to take on a heavy responsibility in terms of lifestyle choices show that there was resistance to and doubt about the idea of citizenship as informed consumption in the focus groups.
Drawing on the discussion about the right way to become involved, consumption choices appear to be dubiously considered as both desirable and undesirable by some of the focus group participants:
Olga: well, that’s true; I have been engaged in Naturskyddsf€oreningen [the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation] here where we had a campaign about clothing and the impact the industry has and I
probably thought, we had a day of swapping used clothing and a whole week devoted to this and I thought more young people, especially girls, those who consume a lot of clothes, would join, but it was more people like me [LAUGHS], of my age, who showed up
Ove: yes
Olga: to this, it was popular, but not with that age, absolutely not
Young female consumers become unsustainable in relation to the teacher instructors like Olga in this example. Olga concludes that it is only people like herself who are engaged in acti-vates for a more a sustainable development. Again, the idea of sameness is used as a norm for what a sustainable development is and who it is that can live sustainably. Above, it is the con-suming female students who are constructed as responsible to change their consumption behav-ior towards a sustainable development. In this conversation, gendered notions of over-consumption form the young female teacher student as more problematic – and more respon-sible– than other groups of students. Female students are assumed to consume eco-unfriendly products, in contrast to the teacher instructors, who are already consuming according to the middle-class norm of eco-friendly organic food and recycled goods (see e.g. Bradley 2009). Consuming and acting in line with middle-class norms may seem at first glance to be the best way to achieve a sustainable development, however, the taken-for-granted desirability of the middle-class lifestyle is in fact in many ways devastating for the environment (Bradley 2009). Odin, one of the focus group participants, expresses this problem as follows:
Odin: I can sometimes, I might go beyond the point of this conversation, but sometimes I can get a little upset about what counts as doing something. Consequently, it is okay to carbon-offset the [holiday] trip to Thailand and to drink organic drinks on the plane
Ove: [LAUGHS]
Odin: but to live in a rented flat and take the subway to work, that doesn’t give any sustainable development points
Olga: no
Odin: do you see what I mean? Consequently, a green car is valued more than not being able to afford a green car but taking the bus to work, consequently there is a
Ove: only the concept of a green car is really interesting
Odin: consequently, some things count as environmentally friendly
Ove: yes [LAUGHS]
Odin: and have this green-wash label
Odin’s concern here follows a discussion in the focus group about consumption choices and private responsibilities. He states that the inability to make consumption choices makes the non-choices of the less affluent groups in society seem less sustainable. Or that non-non-choices are not hailed as acts of a sustainable development. His critique voices the problem of the active, partici-pating, and choosing subjectivity for a sustainable development, since this subjectivity has the economic capacity to consume in ways that are unsustainable. The other participants do not seem to disagree with Odin, although they are not exactly engaging in his critique either. One way of understanding the interaction above is to conclude that it is hard for teacher instructors to imagine modes of subjectivity outside being active as consumer citizens for sustainable development.
The importance of students’ mental health, well-being, and feelings were also brought up as significant in relation to the possibility of teaching for sustainable development in the future. In what follows, it is suggested that these areas can be addressed through individual consumption:
Nelly: because this has to do with the social dimension of sustainable development, about how we feel. If we feel bad, we can’t care for each other, we can’t care for resources and nature, it won’t happen, and also it should be fun. I usually bring up as an example when I was 25 and I thought the world was coming to an end. You count the environmental problems – overpopulation, acidification, and mercury – and just “argh” and you just stand there with your terrible habits, and then I bought these unbleached filters for coffee that came out during the 80s
Nils: [LAUGHS]
Nelly: and I felt“How fun, Nelly, now you have unbleached coffee filters” and I fell asleep with a smile on my face, so it actually started with the small things and that’s a positive thing because when you feel good you do the next [good] thing [LAUGHS] it sounds a bit simplistic but it is crucial
Consuming the right thing could, according to Nelly, be one way to feel both good and hopeful about the future. Having fun and falling asleep happy are examples of how consumption activities and emotions are entangled in the conversation. Avoiding unnecessary worry and stay-ing positive are examples of modes the participants brstay-ing up in the context of teachstay-ing for sus-tainable development. All of these ideas construct the teacher students in relation to certain behaviors, activities, and emotions connected to consumption. The emphasis on happiness and staying positive might be a reflection of a need to stay upbeat in order to deny the reality of Earth as doomed (see e.g. Zizek2008). Indeed, it seems important to feel good and to have faith in the future when imagining a sustainable development through education. This was a recurring theme in the focus groups, although it was also regarded as problematic by some participants. As cultural studies researcher Sara Ahmed (2010) has shown, happiness and positive thinking can be highly problematic. Ahmed argues that happiness is a forceful imperative in contempor-ary Western societies. For Ahmed, the drive for happiness is a technology of creating the good and proper subject, and those subjects that remain unhappy are seen as deviating from the norm. Ahmed discusses the duty of happiness and the societal expectation that we will be made happy by being part of what is deemed good. Ahmed argues for unhappiness as the possibility of imagining otherwise.
Staying positive in order to keep on acting in favor of a sustainable development seemed important to Nelly and other focus group participants. However, as mentioned above, there were occasions in other focus groups where some of the participants said that education for sus-tainable development should create more rather than less worry in the students. However, these statements did not resonate with the other participants as much as those about keeping up good spirits. The wish and desperation to hold on to positive thinking as a way to justify the futile act of consuming the right product seems to be our only option for creating a good soci-ety through education. This investment in the future was made in the focus groups in the same vein as identified by Ahmed; as our collective inability to imagine otherwise.
The teacher instructors construct student subjectivities who consume and act differently from what they are assumed to do today. The teacher instructors seem to compare the teacher stu-dents to themselves to find that the stustu-dents of today are quite far away from the ideal of the future teacher of sustainable development. One way of understanding this discrepancy is to investigate the intersection of class and gender in relation to a sustainable development. Stacy Alaimo’s (2000, 176) concept of “domestic citizenship” is useful for problematizing the ways in which citizens become insulated from external environmental problems and only able to con-front them within the domestic sphere. Staying happy and acting in accordance with middle-class consumption norms within the domestic sphere are often hailed but also problematized in the focus groups. The imperative of making the right choices is particularly problematized,
although few alternatives are addressed by the teacher instructors. The contestation of these norms shows “the process of subjection” (Butler1997, 83) in terms of both doings and feelings within the formation of sustainable development in education. Here, what we do and how we feel is not a private matter but rather connected to how we organize and wish to organize soci-ety and education. Fantasies about the ideal student of education for sustainable development regulate spheres of social life, by stipulating, for example, what we are expected to do (particu-larly as consumers) and how we are supposed to feel.
Teacher student subjectivities as unknowledgeable
How teacher student subjectivities are formed in relation to understandings of knowledge in education for sustainable development also relates directly to ideas about the purpose of educa-tion in light of environmental change. Below, I discuss how the purpose of educaeduca-tion is formed in the focus group conversations through the ways in which the participants talk about the students.
In several of the focus group discussions, it becomes apparent that the teacher students are expected to know certain things before beginning their teaching training. In the quote below, two participants in one of the groups, Nils and Nelly, express concerns about the ignorance of the teacher students:
Nils: I believe that all people born in this country know this [about photosynthesis] already, that’s citizen knowledge
Nelly: I believe that everyone has read during the last 20-30 years about scampi, about palm oil and such, but those who don’t provide themselves with
Nils: I know it
In Nils and Nelly’s discussion, specific knowledge is expected to follow from being born into citizenship of a specific country (Sweden) at a specific point in time. It also seems as if know-ledge is expected to follow from continuously reading up on contemporary topics and actively searching for scientific knowledge. The students are seen as problematic when they do not live up to expectations that they possess certain types of common knowledge prior to entering the teacher education. Participants in several of the focus groups expressed that the students are ignorant in relation to education for sustainable development. Those few teacher students who are knowledgeable are described as unusual and more aware than the rest:
Anastasia: [… ] still, I think that there are a couple of students who are well aware of sustainable development, but otherwise there is a terrible lack of knowledge I think among the students, that they are so unfamiliar and then I think, I mean they have gone through … I mean most of them are pretty young so they must have gone through primary school while sustainable development must have been brought up, that I can also
Andre: should have been brought up
Despite following the mandatory educational system, most students seem to know far too lit-tle about sustainable development, according to Anastasia and Andre. Education does not seem to have made a difference in this respect. Those few students who were described as aware seemed to be so for extracurricular reasons; they had not gotten this knowledge as a result of their formal education. These few students were described as conscious. Another interpretation of the quote above is that Andre might be pointing towards a systemic problem, in that these issues are not brought up at school. Despite the teaching conducted by the teacher instructors, some students still remain unaware according to Nils:
Nils: yes, I got the impression that there weren’t many students who were very informed or had very clear ideas about what sustainable development could be, and my impression is that’s still the case for a great many
What Nils seems to be saying here is that the students’ poorly formed ideas about sustainable development is problematic, and what the students are and how they understand things can become a problem for the teacher instructors. What Nils says is that a great many students do not improve their knowledge about sustainable development while studying in the teacher edu-cation program. It seems as if some of the teacher instructors in the focus groups would prefer some other types of students, students who already know the right things and have little need to even go through the teacher education. Students who would be more same than different from the teacher instructors. The following conversation is also on the topic of inad-equate students:
Sebastian: or what is your impression Sandra, from the seminar about the lack of planets [referring to that humans use planetary resources that exceed the resources on one planet] and so on. Do you have any reflections from there?
Sandra: no, but it’s mostly about what you can do as an individual I guess Sebastian: yes
Sandra: you have to fight to get past the sorting-waste stage
Sebastian: yes
Sandra: many write in their reflection diaries“but I sort my waste at least, or I will at least get better at sorting waste”
Sebastian: yes, that’s right. Yes
Sandra: maybe [they] should have reached a bit higher, but it’s good if we start there and then you can continue the work
What both Sandra and her colleague seem to agree on above is a rather static idea of the relationship between the student subjectivities and the definition of knowledge in education. Stephen Sterling (2004, 58) refers to this view on learning as adaptive where“the dominant para-digm maintains its stability”. Ideas about what the teacher students should learn are seldom talked about, but rather what they ought to know before they enter into the teacher education program. On the one hand, Sandra seems hopeful when she concludes that the students’ indi-vidual focus is a start from which she can“continue the work.” However, the understanding of who the teacher student is and can become seems to be almost unchangeable independent of the perceived impact of education:
Solveig: and I don’t think we have a very high level Sebastian: no
Solveig: on the course, what we talk about is what in some ways is present in the public debate
Sebastian: mm-hmm
Solveig: but the teacher students don’t participate in that, if you choose to listen to Riks Megapol [sic! A mixture of two commercial radio channels: Riks FM and Mix Megapol] instead of P1 [a Swedish Radio public broadcasting station]
Solveig: if you consistently neglect all news related to current affairs programs on TV and watch Big Brother or Halvåtta hos mig [a cooking program broadcast on a commercial TV channel], which I understand is very popular with the students
Sebastian: [LAUGHS]
Sofia: really [LAUGHS]
Sandra: at least they have organic food sometimes
Everyone: [LAUGHS]
According to these teacher instructors, it seems as if the teacher students are what they are, and they do what they do independently of education. According to Solveig, there exist students who watch other types of TV programs (news-related current affairs programs), but those are not the students in the teacher education program. In some sense, the teacher students seem to be understood as particularly unknowledgeable, compared with an undefined conception of others. Left only with the act of choosing as media consumers, the teacher students seem to be choosing the wrong thing. Clearly, both Solveig and Sandra expect their students to know cer-tain things before they begin their teacher education, preferably things they would learn by par-ticipating in public debates. The teacher instructors have specific notions about public debate– about what a public debate is and where it takes place. Gendered notions of caring only for the limited domestic space are criticized in favor of the public domain. The domestic sphere is neglected as important for creating sustainability, with the risk of forming the private sphere as apolitical. The teacher instructors’ understanding of the public debate also shows that certain modes of knowledge are expected of the students independent of what they are expected to learn though education. However, there is also resistance to these static understandings of students:
Merith: but I actually don’t think you can say that these ones shouldn’t study here, or that they should, because I’m thinking that it’s some kind of learning process that you as a student are also part of, all of a sudden, the penny drops
Minna: exactly
Merith: when you’ve been working, after two years or Melker: yes, that’s right
Merith: it may drop after the first semester at the university
Melker: yes absolutely
What Merith says above gives considerable credit to education, compared to how education is talked about by many of the other participants. Merith voices this opinion in opposition to the other participants’ talk of students as either good or bad. Indeed, through Merith’s account, the participants in this situation seem to form an understanding of education as a field of possibility (see e.g. Holfelder2019).
Despite some resistance, teacher education in the domain of education for sustainable devel-opment becomes a passage point in these discussions which requires specific, static subjects; education becomes a site of confirming identity by being, not of transformation and possibility. The ways the teacher instructors view knowledge in relation to the available teacher student subjectivities tend to reflect a rather static idea of the purpose of teacher education and the aim of becoming educated. Furthermore, the students are compared to the teacher instructors, who are regarded as already fully knowledgeable in education for sustainable development.
Sameness rather than difference, and preservation rather than transformation, seem to be what education and education for sustainable development come to be about. Although there is room for different accounts of sustainable student subjectivities, overall it leads to an unsustain-able purpose of knowledge and education which preserves rather than challenges the sta-tus quo.
Concluding discussion
Teachers and education are often understood as important for achieving sustainability and sus-tainable development (UNESCO 2017; see e.g. Gough and Scott 2008; Huckle and Wals 2015). Teacher education is supposed to be a site of education and training where students can become teachers. Furthermore, teacher education is a site that takes part in forming future teachers and citizens in the domain of education for sustainable development. The aim of this paper has been to critically investigate how teacher instructors contribute to the formation of future teachers in relation to goals about sustainable development in education. Through an analysis of the construction of teacher student subjectivities, the paper focused on focus group discussions in which the students were formed and problematized both as active and happy consumers and as unknowledgeable. Examining these formations and constructions is a way of studying which subjectivities are available to teacher education students. These formations and constructions have consequences for real life experiences and possibilities in education. The con-tribution of this paper can be summarized under two concluding statements:
First, the preferred teacher student in relation to education for sustainable development is someone who consumes in certain ways, is responsible, knows certain things, and relates to edu-cation in specific ways before enrolling in the teacher eduedu-cation program. The relationship between the teacher students and their education seems to be perceived as a relation of being rather than becoming. The students are described and judged for who they are imagined to be, rather than for who they might be able to become through education. Similar to Ideland’s (2019) conclusion on how children are normatively constructed in education for sustainable development, this paper shows that future teachers also are normatively constructed through expectations of what they should feel and how they should act. In line with Hellberg and Knutsson (2018), the students mainly are constructed for a life-trajectory as consumers for a sus-tainable development.
Second, the preferred teacher student in relation to education for sustainable development is supposed to resemble the teacher instructors. In some of the discussions above, the teacher instructors seem to discredit their students for not knowing enough and for consuming, focusing on, and engaging in the wrong things before and during their education. One interpretation of these criticisms is that the students are seen as failures because of their inability to resemble the teacher instructors themselves. An ideal of sameness through education is used at the expense of imagining education as a site of possibility. In line with Holfelder’s discussion of ESD (2019), it seems clear that education for sustainable development in these discussions is constructed in a closed way which rejects the idea of an open future through education. Putting it in the words of Stephen Sterling (2004, 58), it could be argued that “the dominant paradigm maintains its stability”.
Taken together, the preferred teacher student in relation to education for sustainable devel-opment has an active lifestyle, participates in public debates, is happy, and consumes eco-friendly goods, often in line with the teacher instructors themselves. Similar to earlier studies on desirable subjectivities in sustainability-related practices, the preferred teacher student in matters related to sustainable development often seems to be formed in proximity to Swedish middle-class norms (see e.g. Hellberg and Knutsson 2018; Ideland 2019). The discussions in the focus groups both use and challenge discursive formations of the Swedish middle class as particularly
sustainable, green, and environmentally friendly subjects. The problem of the consumer citizen as one of the most accessible subjectivities for the middle class is not only that it is a position that uses a lot of resources. By proposing environmental friendly shopping, cleaning, and recy-cling, subjects become responsible for dealing with environmental problems while the capitalist system which generates most of the problems is left unchallenged (Jickling and Wals 2008; Huckle and Wals 2015; Ideland and Malmberg 2015; Hellberg and Knutsson 2018; Holfelder
2019). The results from this study stem from empirical research in Sweden. We know from previ-ous research that education for sustainable development forms different subjectivities for differ-ent people (e.g. Hellberg and Knutsson2018; Ideland2019). Which subjectivities that are formed in educational practices should remain an important object of study for researchers exploring critical aspects of global initiatives as they materialise in local educational practices.
To conclude, I argue that education for sustainable development should seek to widen its scope by critically engaging with how those under education are formed through taken for granted norms of good intentions and education for sustainable development in the present. Instead of using education for sustainable development to preserve sameness, we need to con-tinuously ask critical questions about what we can become through education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
Swedish Energy Agency.
Notes on contributor
Hanna Sj€ogren(PhD) is senior lecturer at the Department of Children, Youth and Society at Malm€o University in Sweden. Her research interests concern how people in education understand and interpret environmental change as an entangled cultural, societal and scientific phenomenon.
ORCID
Hanna Sj€ogren http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4833-8292 References
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