In educational practice there is an ongoing discussion about social change in relation to sustainability (Ferreira 2013; Jickling and Wals 2008; Læssøe 2010). When our contemporary way of living is declared unsustainable and education is put forward to make a ‘social change’ towards a more ‘sustainable living’, we interpret this from a discourse theoretical view that the educational system becomes dislocated in the attempts of interpreting this new order (Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Laclau 1990). In this state, new articulations develop to interpret how to make a new structure to stabilise the new order. To analyse how ‘social change’ (re)articulate desirable aims in educational practice, we start from teacher discussions. The analyses focus on articulations of how students are supposed to act in relation to sustainability. Through the fundamental meaning of those articulations, new spaces of representations are opened where it becomes possible to legitimate certain actions as natural. In this study we have been able to identify three struggling ESD-discourses concerning ‘social change’, comprising desirable teacher-specific-positions and emerging ‘myths’ of ‘social change’. The result shows how the teachers are struggling between three positions; the rational subject - as a neutral conductor, the responsible subject - as a role model, or the reconstructing subject - as a reconstructor. This position is depending on how socialisation towards sustainable lifestyles, political and ethical perspectives are identified in relation to educational aims (Biesta 2009). Thus the ‘myth’ of ‘social change’ in ESD has implications on how to acknowledge ‘social change’ as mainly being a process to empower students for ‘right’ choices, or to uphold ‘social change’ as a way for students to explore new interpretations of a more sustainable living, i.e. to develop as political subjects (cf. Lundegård and Wickman 2012).

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