Historically, Scandinavian educational thought has been heavily influenced by the continental enlightenment ideal of Bildung and as a result put concepts such as bildning, dannelse and uddannelse at the heart of Swedish and Danish conceptions of education. Within the field of environmental education research, ideas associated with Bildung inform concepts such as action competence (Jensen & Schnack, 1997) or environmental education as fostering democratic actions and deliberations (Breiting & Wickenberg, 2010; Englund, Öhman, & Östman, 2008; Læssœ & Öhman, 2010). At the heart of these conceptions is the acknowledgement of individual aspects of learning and notion of agency as aspects are central to the concept of Bildung (cf. Hopmann & Riquarts, 1995; Hopmann, 2007). We argue, the acknowledgment of the individual aspect of learning that emerges in the gap between didactic intervention and individual meaning-making problematizes the notion of environmental education as having primarily a social reformative function. Instead, we highlight that the reformative potential of environmental education comes to a fore once any didactic intervention acknowledges the divergent, non-social aspects of learning. Such a conception as we will put it forward in the paper conceives of meaning-making as a partially individual endeavor that to some extent is never congruent with others’ meaning-making and therefore cannot be social in an fully inclusive understanding of the term. The paper and subsequent presentation is to explore the consequences of this non-congruence between didactic intervention aimed at socialization and learning as meaning-making and how an emphasis of this non-congruence can reflect on conceptions of environmental education. By drawing on recent work on revitalized concepts of Bildung, we emphasize Bildung as a potentially central, current and radical concept within the ESE field with the potential strengthen the focus on social and especially non-social perspectives of learning (Jensen, 2013; Biesta, 2002). We thereby outline a conception of Environmental Bildung that emphasizes the importance of the excess learning that takes place as a result of the highlighted non-congruence.

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