Sustainability persists as an important concept within education and, following the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, is now promoted globally through Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2015). Within Europe, the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s Committee on Environmental Policy suggests that advances in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are taking place, particularly with developing pedagogical approaches (2015). However, despite this, since the general election in 2010 in England there has been significantly less policy emphasis on sustainable development which has ‘inhibited the wider adoption of good practice in ESD’ (UNESCO, 2013). As such, UNESCO argue that although good practice in ESD exists in England, there is no coherent view at policy or practice level about how it can most appropriately be experienced by learners and how it can contribute to improved learner outcomes. Leal Filho suggests this is a picture which remains representative of a number of European countries where discussions on the exact nature of ESD are still limited and take place only unsystematically and irregularly (2010). In this way, it seems that there is a need to better establish a pedagogy for ESD which gives students a stronger, more critical understanding of sustainable development issues.  

Within the context of Higher Education, Cotton and Winter (2010) suggest that a number of pedagogic approaches have emerged based primarily on dialogue and experience; for example, role plays, stimulus activities, debates and problem-based learning. Despite this, Sund and Öhman (2014) argue that a central challenge for teachers remains how to create opportunities for students to discover and experience the differences and conflicts that are embedded in issues related to sustainable development. According to Hicks and Bord (2001), little attention has been paid to the affective dimension of learning environmental issues, and yet in the context of Sweden it has been suggested that if students create an emotional relation to the world these can lead to them taking a stand for or against certain issues (Lundegård, 2008). Although, within the context of teaching controversial issues in schools, Oulton et al (2004) suggest caution when using potentially emotive pedagogies, perhaps affective learning outside the context of more confrontational debate could form the basis of a pedagogical approach to ESD within schools?

UNESCO suggest that addressing sustainability requires an holistic, interdisciplinary approach which brings together different disciplines while retaining their distinct identities (1997). As such, interdisciplinary teaching has the potential to expose learners more explicitly to the plurality of thinking which allows them to develop their own perspectives about sustainability (Jickling, 2003). However, although there is an extensive literature on interdisciplinarity, there has been relatively little investigation of the ways in which learners deal with and respond to this central aspect of sustainability education (Feng, 2012). As such, this study goes some way to address this, taking an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach by using poetry (traditionally bounded within the disciplinary community of English) as a stimulus to critically engage with ideas of sustainability within the context of a geography lesson. The study was framed as an interpretive case study within a constructivist epistemology; it aimed to incorporate pedagogies of critical thinking and discussion with those provoking learning in the affective dimension in supporting its aims of developing students’ critical understanding of sustainable development.

More specifically, three research questions framed this research:

(1) What were student understandings of sustainability before the lesson?  

(2) In what ways and by what processes did the students’ understandings and representations of sustainability change over the course of the lesson?

(3) What are the implications for interdisciplinary ESD practice within and beyond the UK context?

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