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Hur kan lärare arbeta med hållbar utveckling i en tid då globala kriser och klimatförändringar väcker både rädsla och oro? Och hur kan elever samtidigt känna hopp inför sin framtid och sitt vuxna liv? Dessa frågor är utgångspunkt för det utvecklings- och forskningsprojekt som utgör basen i denna bok. Du får följa med i berättelser som lärare och elever skapat tillsammans för att utveckla kunskap om social, ekologisk och ekonomisk hållbarhet. Boken redogör för de pedagogiska utgångspunkterna, men ger också rikligt med praktiska exempel på metoder och former för undervisning i och genom demokratiska och relationella förhållningssätt. Du får konkreta tips på hur du kan integrera hållbar utveckling i undervisningen. Såväl kritiska aspekter som lärdomar och möjligheter lyfts fram. I centrum står eleven och läraren utifrån det relationspedagogiska perspektivet. Att undervisa i hållbar utveckling: Relationellt perspektiv vänder sig till lärarstudenter och verksamma lärare i årskurs F-6. Bokens syfte är att inspirera, stödja och utgöra diskussionsunderlag i skolans arbete med miljöperspektivet och hållbar utveckling.

We are facing a challenging and demanding time, which has been declared a climate emergency (CEDAMIA, 2020). A climate emergency (and thus the present state of affairs) is described as ‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2019). The impact of climate change and pollution of water, air and land is affecting human and non-human lives all over the world. Environmental activists and climate scientists have continued, persistently and diligently, the work of bringing evidence-based arguments to the public. Their efforts, unfortunately, do not seem to be convincing enough; they are not relevant or do not get through to people. The sustainability rhetoric may have had its day, and new ways of communicating climate issues are called for. Raising awareness and discussing environmental issues do not directly result in behavioural change or policy action, as Moser and Dilling (2011) point out. Nor does providing more and improved facts, nor inculcating fear. Communication for social change must, they claim, entail efforts to increase the motivation to make a change, and efforts to lower the barriers to realizing it. In line with Moser and Dillon, we argue that people, in a democratic spirit, ought to be actively committed to environmental and/or social issues, making their voices and values heard, and not least to be able to contribute to the making of collective responses. In other words, environmental education needs to reach the hearts of students within various levels of education. Accordingly, the challenge is to acknowledge our emotions, which are responses to an uncertain situation: fear, anger, anxiety, desperation but also hope, optimism, faith, confdence and expectation. Acknowledging these feelings may be a powerful beginning of an essential conversation, which can open up possibilities for new understandings, new actions and new connections between people, and between people and more-than-humans. Actions – or inactions – we take today will make a difference in the future.

This article studies how environmental sustainability is integrated in a Storyline, which include learning about and through sustainability, conducted in two primary school classes, Grade 2 (children’s age 8- 9) in Sweden. It examines the significant aspects of the Storyline approach in relation to democratic values and young pupils’ sense of agency. In addition, it examines how pupils comprehend the concept of sustainability, and the Storyline approach itself. The empirical material consists of classroom observation and individual semistructured interviews with 20 pupils and 2 teachers. Theories of relational pedagogy are used to analyze the material. The results show that Storyline work depends on a skilled, compassionate and caring teacher, who creates an open climate in the classroom. It is argued that both a pedagogical theoretical foundation, such as relational pedagogy, and a deliberate teaching and learning approach, such as Storyline, are crucial when implementing issues of sustainability in primary school education.

This volume focuses on the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), education, to look at sustainability from various angles with the purpose of challenging preconceptions about what sustainable education might entail and how it should be conducted. To this end, the book assembles scholars from various research fields and disciplines, who are willing to be at the cutting edge regarding sustainability and education on all levels with students in the ages of 6-15. Through this approach, the text points towards a “wild pedagogy” in line with post-sustainable thinking. This involves agency and the role of nature itself as a co-educator, and promotes cultural changes, and explorative processes of finding “the wild” – the unknown, and complexity in nature – and thus of challenging the human need for control. This approach is also, in line with the 2030 Agenda, an attempt to move from advocating predetermined behavioural change to embracing a pluralistic perspective on sustainability, based on holistic views on education. Such views include curiosity, wonderment, compassion and agency as guiding lights. The book is structured into three sections, based on three interrelated strands. These strands are, in various ways, dependent on one another and further engaged with bringing education theory and practice together. These strands are 1) Belonging and sensing, 2) Critical thinking, social justice and action competence, and 3) Creating hope in a vanishing world. These strands aim to increase our access to and understanding of the ways in which sustainability can be integrated into education and why. The purpose of the text is to encourage educators of all kinds and levels, as well as scholars in different fields, to explore new perspectives on education for sustainable development. The book examines probes in diverse academic fields and focuses on how to combine different approaches and content, and therefore everyone interested in interdisciplinary and cross-curricular teaching and learning should find this work enlightening.

Thinking and asking authentic questions about nearby places, including ecosystems, can metaphorically be compared to reading the world as a text, linking local issues to global ones. The focus in this chapter is holistic pedagogies, which combine socio-ecological aspects of sustainable learning with opportunities for active communication. Drawing on and using vignettes from two case studies in the primary school years, we will analyse dimensions of socio-ecological literacies in relation to students’ opportunities for representation and agency.

Practical experience and first-hand insight into the school systems of other countries enables student teachers to cultivate global understanding. Teacher education programme in Sweden has four placements. Student teachers are encouraged to complete one of these abroad. The aim with this study is to examine student teachers’ experiences of teaching primary school pupils in Uganda. The study underpins by the concepts of ethical literacy, the other and action readiness. Student teachers’ reflections on their experiences deal with the emotions that are aroused in their process work of becoming a teacher. The results show that the experiences from teaching in a postcolonial school system were overwhelming for the student teachers involved. The study raises concerns about the incentives to develop future teacher qualities versus arranging internships abroad to develop students’ personal growth.

This essay shows art-works of young students diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Through a six-week long theme, the students worked with self-portraits, through three phases. First, they made a sketch without any special instructions. Second, they used a grid-method. Third, they created personal, innovative, and original images. The grid method was a way to meet the AS students’ needs for clear instructions. The third phase was quite challenging for the student. However, when they overcame the obstacles, they made creative and personal portraits. It was crucial for the students to start in the known before entering the unknown.

This article presents a six-week long action research study in two primary school classes, with the aim of exploring how a Storyline approach can facilitate learning and acting on sustainability issues, and how this approach might enhance pupils’ agency. This study is underpinned by and analyzed through theories of relational pedagogy, in which communication processes and interaction are central aspects of the learning process. The empirical material consists of video observations from classroom situations. The results show relational aspects of the teacher’s work in a Storyline and highlight the importance of the teacher’s caring role Storyline instruction. Further, results suggest that the reflective process entails critical thinking and has potential to support development of pupils’ democratic capabilities, including a civic dimension. This action research study adds to evidence concerning how relational agency has been exercised and performed through features of a Storyline.

In this closing chapter, we provide a summary of the previous ten chapters. Each chapter has addressed different perspectives of human relationships with the natural environment and with the more-than-human world, which are shown to be relevant to Education for Sustainable Development. In this anthology, we have encountered contexts from South Africa, Canada, Sweden, and Australia and even contexts of imagined places and documented art projects. Not least, we have encountered the context of our contemporary situation itself, with reference to the ongoing climate emergency and mass extinction. The authors have brought our attention to sustainability issues, implicitly and explicitly, some in more well-known ways and others by using more surprising approaches. We have encountered approaches that include the art of being and sensing, inquiry-based teaching and learning with children and young people with regards to their place-based opportunities and challenges, and also an approach that includes the position of facing an uncertain future ecology whilst creating hope. In retrospect, this anthology instantiates a collaborative effort that spans across nations and scientific disciplines. As editors, we are most grateful for this international and interdisciplinary collaboration. This anthology deals with the problematic situation we have positioned ourselves in by over-exploiting the planet’s resources. Regarding this fateful situation, intertwined themes are made visible in the chapters, with reference to belonging and sensing, critical thinking and acting. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge the despair and anguish the current condition creates and, yet, they also offer us hope. These intertwined themes connect despair with hope, anxiety with possible ways of action, true wonderment with criticality, ecology with art, theory with practice, education with society, and, as alarming as it might sound, human existence with the collapse of humanity. Reading and engaging with the chapters included in this anthology moves us to a point where dichotomies can no longer be accepted. Instead, it is made clear that we (as educators, researchers, and citizens) have to embrace the complexity, the sharp edges, the fuzziness, and the contradictions that our shared situation is constituted of. In this way, each chapter presents a narrative that argues that we must become cognizant of the broad picture of our current place in human history. In other words, we are doomed to encounter life and life’s premises with open eyes, not as a matter of surrendering to the whims of fate, but instead with an attitude of approaching life and life’s premises with dignity. The philosopher Martin Hägglund (2019) suggests that human beings are “reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason, we are not reconciled to live unworthy lives” (p. 369). Drawing on Hägglund, we need to hold our gaze steady when we observe the reality of disrupted ecosystems, frightening climate change, and the extinction of species. “We are what we do and we can do things differently”, writes Hägglund (2019, p. 20). In this light, the task of a democratic society that takes the challenges of climate change, mass extinction, and socio-ecological action seriously remains to be completed.

As a Swede, Margaretha is always close to a forest, even in the cities. In fact, approximately 70% of the land area is predominated by it. When Margaretha had the opportunity to site her research in the forest it felt like a match made in heaven. She decided to investigate people’s relationships with forests, trees and other plants in the light of the notion of plant blindness. Specifically, Margaretha employed an aesthetic view on sensoric experiences of being in the forest. Accordingly, her research is interdisciplinary, combining art and pedagogy with environmental and sustainability issues. In this chapter, Margaretha presents vignettes of her experiences of the two first years as a PhD student in a narrative way. With the intention of bringing meaning to her experiences, the vignettes are reflected through the lenses of phenomenology. Margaretha begins by explaining how she came across the PhD position. Then she examines an identity crisis and the experience of a challenging academic environment. Next, she looks at one turning point experienced at a European Educational Research Association seasonal school in Cambridge through lively meetings with fellow doctoral students. Thereafter, she describes a stressful situation and a second turning point that happened while she was investigating phenomenology, followed by a final paragraph on how to proceed.