Sustainable development can be understood as belonging to the epistemic object category (Lund, 2011), a theoretical construct, which lends itself to the knowledge –creation learning metaphor. An epistemic object typically focuses on issues that are beyond the individual’s knowledge and understanding. I interpret this notion of object to follow a centrifugal movement. The content knowledge is fuzzy, ill-defined and changeable. The underpinning idea is that knowledge creation takes place in our knowledge society and education needs to follow suit. In the Swedish curriculum for upper-secondary school it is stated that

“… school’s task of imparting knowledge presupposes an active discussion about concepts of knowledge, about what knowledge is important today, what will be important in the future, and also about how learning and the acquisition of knowledge takes place” (Skolverket [Swedish National Agency for Education], 2011, p. 6).

Knowledge creation is a learning metaphor that orients towards various interpretations, not the least when it comes to notions of collective knowledge and a practical action-knowledge. In terms of knowledge outcomes in the education for sustainable development, various epistemological issues arise. The underlying notion of transdisciplinary education is that in meeting with others you actively create new knowledge, rather than reproduce familiar knowledge. Lund&Hauge (2001) defines this new knowledge as new for the individual. The organizational knowledge-creation approach has transferred into the field of education and needs to be theoretically elaborated on. Furthermore, the number of empirical studies of knowledge creation in the field of education is limited and an empirical study of the epistemic beliefs among upper-secondary students involved in project-work regarding sustainable development, could address both the theory of knowledge creation in education as well as the practice of teaching and organizing educational practice. 

The overall aim of this study is to explore the knowledge creation metaphor of learning, which concerns the interrelationships between students’ concepts of knowledge, transdisciplinarity and sustainable development. In such a learning context it becomes relevant to understand what such epistemic beliefs are, do and mean. Educational research on epistemic beliefs, initiated by William G. Perry (Perry, 1968), looked at the developmental stages of students’ intellectual positions.  Marlene Schommer (Schommer, 1990)then developed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire in order to look at the dimensionality of the students’ belief systems. A similar research instrument has been developed; contextualized and adjusted to approach concepts of knowledge in transdisciplinary education.

This paper will present initial findings from the instrument grasping the epistemic beliefs of 208 participating students in a project regarding sustainable development.

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