"Sustainability issues have unique pedagogical potential"

Katrien Van Poeck: "'How do we solve the traffic problems around our school?' Traffic jams, conflicts between cyclists and motorists, air pollution, a shortage of parking spaces: when pupils get to work very concretely on the mobility problem in their school neighbourhood, they really experience the complexity of that question. Very different from a paper question in a workbook. They discover that people have very different ideas about what the right approach is. That sometimes you have to look beyond facts and also take into account the values of all those involved. And that the knowledge they acquire at school matters when beliefs clash with factual truths."

"In the context of ESD, children and young people can learn a lot when teachers link their lessons to concrete, authentic challenges and address questions of sustainability, for example. Like traffic in their village, or what the school garden can do for biodiversity. But equally, ESD is about challenges in wider society that transcend the school and the local community. When we bring authentic issues of sustainability into schools, it leads to unique opportunities for strong education."

Katrien Van Poeck: "Pedagogues stress that education is valuable in itself and should not become an instrument. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, for example, advocate letting the school be a school. When we use education to tackle sustainability problems, there is a danger that the school and the pupils become an instrument in the search for solutions to those problems. Actually, this danger exists with any kind of project work, you could say. In my first academic paper, 'Learning from sustainable development' [1], I also raised this same danger: the risk that we instrumentalise education when teachers address 'real' sustainability issues with their pupils."

"Should schools then disregard questions around sustainability? Of course not. As an older generation, we should not deny young people the confrontation with concrete issues around sustainability. If not, we are shirking our pedagogical responsibility. Moreover, pupils often bring these social issues on their own initiative. The school is a unique place, where finding an immediate solution need not be the highest goal. Where questions are allowed to lead to more questions, not immediate answers. This pedagogical perspective could be called 'learning from sustainable development'. If you engage with real sustainability problems in the classroom or at school, then you offer pupils unique learning opportunities."

"When problems and issues remain abstract, pupils are more likely to find escape routes to avoid having to figure out whether what someone is claiming is feasible or desirable. Or to avoid having to say they disagree with a statement. After all, if it is not 'for real' anyway, what does it matter? Pupils who get the chance to remodel their playground do speak out, do question faulty reasoning of classmates. Authentic situations boost their critical sense and engagement."

"Only when the question becomes concrete do pupils think things through. Then they realise that you cannot just fantasise everything together, and that the perspective of others matters. To return for a moment to tackling traffic problems around the school: making the entire village centre traffic-free sounds like a good idea. Until pupils notice that traders do not want parking spaces to disappear or their shops to become inaccessible. The perspective of those traders matters; they have reasons to oppose. And others do have good reasons to restrict car traffic. 'Everyone's opinion': such deadpan arguments are immediately off the mark. You miss out on that richness when the lesson lingers in the abstract and hypothetical."

Katrien Van Poeck: "In education, we can dwell on complex questions. That is enormously enriching, and very necessary. In the world outside the classroom, every problem has to be solved as quickly as possible. At school you can slow down, reflect. This is how people learn to deal with complex problems, to take positions. In this way, pupils see that you can look at a problem in more than one way. And at the same time, they learn that opinions don't stand up if they conflict with facts."

"The ultimate goal of education is to give pupils a good education, not to solve those issues. That balancing act requires a lot from the teacher. In inquiry-based learning, teachers often know from the start where their pupils will land. But inquiry-based learning only becomes authentic when they dare, together with their pupils, not to know. At the same time, teachers need to be prepared to perfection and have a clear idea of the process they want to go through with their class."

Katrien Van Poeck: "To describe the role of the teacher, Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons' metaphor [3] is illuminating. Teaching, they argue, is about putting something on the table: drawing attention to an issue and studying it. But also to let it go afterwards. I like to work with that metaphor myself. What you put on the table first is a sustainability problem. An issue that the teacher feels he needs to bring to the attention of his pupils in class or at school. To do something with it, or to relate to it."

"Putting a problem on the table means that you are not yet forcing solutions to the problem on your pupils. You only put it on the table, with the chance to - as Hannah Arendt puts it - 'do something new with it'. Once the problem is on the table, as a teacher you can add a few things to it. Knowledge that we already have, subject matter that we think will give pupils useful insights to work with that sustainability issue. If you want to tackle the mobility problem around the school, you need to know what air pollution does to our health. You can't deprive pupils of that knowledge. After which pupils try to assess for themselves what they do with that knowledge."

Katrien Van Poeck: "In this way, the educational process becomes an authentic search for solutions that even the teacher is not yet familiar with. If there are few or no trees near the school, pupils might come up with the idea of planting trees for the climate. Their own answer to a real problem. Teachers know how that answer will create new authentic problems. 'Who wants a tree on their doorstep? What tree species should we plant? Who pays for it, where do you get permission?'"

"Teachers who explore with their pupils give them opportunities to renew the world, as Hannah Arendt puts it [3]. The older generation always has that double responsibility: to put an authentic problem on the table, while giving the new generation the chance to do their thing with it."

"When pupils take up a local or concrete sustainability challenge, a democratic educational process emerges. In this way, the school becomes a democratic training ground, where pupils can already practice their role as citizens. A place where the teacher does not decide everything beforehand and pupils explore an issue, ask themselves how they deal with it and what choices they can make."

Katrien Van Poeck: "In an attempt to avoid instrumentalising education, a kind of diffidence arose to say that you want to achieve certain goals with your education. Especially when it comes to sustainability. As if we had to make a clear choice between normative, instrumental education on the one hand and emancipatory education on the other. That dichotomy is sometimes too short, because you are always normative in your education, you always have a goal."

"A distinction that does need to be clear: the pedagogical goals you pursue versus having concrete sustainability goals in mind. The fact that you set pedagogical goals does not mean that you want to determine in the place of pupils what they should think and do with those issues. Your pedagogical goal can be that pupils think and do something. That they learn to explore different perspectives on an issue and can respectfully listen to others' input before making a decision. Or that they can distinguish between facts and opinions. Something very different from them understanding the importance of recycling at the end of the lesson."

"Within ESD, it is problematic when teachers prioritise a particular solution to a sustainability problem as a goal and impose it on their pupils. But it is equally problematic when teachers say they have no goals. That they only listen to what pupils themselves want to learn or what they think about a particular issue. Then we evade our pedagogical responsibility. If you only start and end at what pupils themselves want to learn, or what they think about it in advance, then you deprive them of the opportunity to broaden their outlook, challenge their own views and renew their world."

This interview was made possible by the UNI4ST project (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843437), the SEAS project (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 824522) and the 'Open schooling for sustainable cities and communities' project (Formas grant 2018-01427).