Reflections on a National Monitoring of Education for Sustainable Development and the science-policy-interface

Author(s):

Mandy Singer-Brodowski(presenting / submitting)Nadine Etzkorn(presenting)Antje Brock

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

30 SES 02 A, Policy and Montioring Progress in SD and ESD

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

15:15-16:45

Room:

K6.08

Chair:

Stefan Bengtsson

Contribution

Policy research in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is getting more and more attention (Van Poeck/ Lysgaard 2015, Læssøe et al. 2013). It can offer insights about the typical processes and dynamics of strengthening ESD in a special area and thereby has the potential to contribute fruitfully to a mainstreaming of ESD. While conducting ESD policy research projects, it is important to reflect on the different systems and their dominant actors and logics that come together at the science-policy interface. On the one side, there is the logics of policy where evidence-based recommendations are of importance for efforts in strengthening ESD in order to legitimatize and communicate policy initiatives towards the wider public. This policy-level also has to deal with an increasing orientation of local policies towards international trends and best practices (McKenzie et al. 2015) as a result of emerging international indicators and benchmarking systems. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the heart of the Agenda 2030 and the search for an adequate indicator of the aim 4.7 represent this tendency to orientate educational and sustainability policy towards standardized paths of governance. On the other side, the logics of science does, in the context of ESD, support a systematic knowledge production to describe the implementation of ESD, its drivers and barriers. Beside such a descriptive-analytical form of scientific knowledge production, a transformational research approach in sustainability science emerges. It is aiming at the active contribution to solve concrete sustainability problems (Wiek/Lang 2016). Furthermore, in sustainability research, there is a growing attention towards identifying leverage points (Meadows 1999, Abson et al. 2016) in order to find out how to effectively intervening in complex systems. While such a transformational academic approach means a greater entanglement of science with the political sphere, transformational researchers should systematically reflect the impacts of their practices, regarding the risks and borders of scientific evidence, indicator-based research projects and the tendencies of standardization and measurability in the sustainability and ESD policy context (Hursh et al. 2015, Bessant et al. 2015, Huckle/Wals 2015, McKenzie et al. 2015)?

This paper presentation will focus on the above-described tensions in terms of the science-policy interface in the context of ESD in Germany by presenting and discussing the preliminary results of the national ESD Global Action Program monitoring for Germany. Educational monitoring can be understood as a systematic and indicator-based observation of input-, output- and process aspects of an educational system for the reason of comparison and quality improvement (Ioannidou 2010: 163). The aim of a monitoring is to inform experts in highly relevant positions and the interested public (Döbert/ Weißhaupt 2012). The research project focuses on analyzing the status quo of the ESD-implementation in Germany as well as its development during the last five years. Thereby, it will show a differentiated picture of the extent and quality of ESD activities in six areas of the German educational system: early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training, higher education, education in the context of municipalities as well as informal and non-formal learning. The monitoring project is part of the Scientific Advisory Process of the Global Action Program in Germany by the Freie Universität Berlin and is closely connected to the expert groups and networks that were designed for the GAP as well as to the national Ministry of Education and Research in Germany as a project partner. The project results will be synthesized in recommendations for a more profound and effective implementation of ESD in the German educational system.

Method

The research project is comprised of four phases. During the first phase, relevant indicators for the implementation of ESD in the German educational system were collected and developed based on a literature review. This process has led to the compilation of an overarching indicator-set, specified for the six different educational areas. Based on these indicators, relevant documents, like curricula of schools, of higher and vocational education, etc., have been analyzed in a desk research through a qualitative and quantitative content analysis (Krippendorf 2004) with MAXQDA, a software for data analysis. Depending on their quantity, the relevant text segments have been analyzed, displayed and discussed in a more quantitative or qualitative way. The first out of two phases of this desk research has been conducted in Winter 2016/2017 and will serve as a baseline of the status quo of ESD, which represents a starting point for observing and evaluating the implementation of ESD in central docu-ments of the educational landscape in Germany. After that, qualitative expert interviews (Meuser/Nagel 2009) are conducted in spring 2017 to identify leverage points for ESD in the German educational system. Leverage points can be described as “places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything” (Meadows 1999). In order to better grasp the complexity of educational real world processes and gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that are driving them, the interviews aims at complementing the limitations of a standard-ized monitoring of the first research phase. Traditionally, policy efforts to transform a system are based on numbers, but this has only a small impact on the transformation of a system. In contrast, more ef-fective leverage points open up a way to more effectively influence the deeper lying level of goals and paradigms of systems. But these changes on the level of paradigm shifts can hardly be measured in terms of numbers or other standardized ways of educational monitoring. The experts for the interviews on leverage points will be selected depending on their expertise in the specific educational fields. Dur-ing the third phase, quantitative as well as qualitative surveys will be carried out to focus on the extent as well as quality of ESD-implementation in the real-world educational settings. Finally, a second desk research phase will identify the progress of implementing ESD in curricula etc. since the first desk re-search phase.

Expected Outcomes

Regarding the implementation of ESD in Germany, the results of the national monitoring demonstrate that there is considerable progress concerning references to ESD in central documents of the educa-tional system. However, there are still huge differences between the examined educational areas as well as between the federal states in Germany. Also, besides the overall progress, the picture shows considerable gaps in integrating ESD. Based on that, advises for a deeper implementation of ESD in the respective fields will be communicated to experts of policy and educational practice as well as to the interested public. While conceptualized as an independent research project, the monitoring differs largely to government-funded self-reports that are often uncritical about problems and failures in the context of ESD and are often producing success stories (Nazir et al. 2009: 27). Nevertheless, the task of the national monitoring is twofold: Firstly, the aim is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of cur-rent ESD-implementation in close cooperation with diverse stakeholders and secondly, to generate transformational and evidence-based recommendations towards experts in government and admin-istration. Regarding the reflections of the science-policy-interface, it can be concluded that the involvement of high-level politics increased the visibility and weight of ESD. The increasing importance of ESD in the German educational system will be documented and communicated by the scientific monitoring. How-ever, the possible drawbacks of this success have to be critically reflected, because there is evidence that the success of mainstreaming ESD goes hand in hand with more standardization and a consensus-oriented set of ESD contents which becomes less ambitious (Aikens et al. 2016; McKenzie et al. 2015). From an academically point of view, one central remaining question leading the development of sci-ence-policy-interface might be: How to reconcile public and political success with the protection of the transformative core of ESD?

References

Abson, D. J.; Fischer, J.; Leventon, J.; Newig, J.; Schomerus, T.; Vilsmaier, U. et al. (2016): Leverage points for sustainability transformation. In: Ambio. Bessant, S. E.F.; Robinson, Z. P.; Ormerod, M. (2015): Neoliberalism, new public management and the sustainable develop-ment agenda of higher education: history, contradictions and synergies. In: Environmental Education Research, 21 (3): 417-432 Döbert, H.; Weißhaupt, H. (2012): Bildungsmonitoring. In: Wacker, A. et al. (Ed.), Schul- und Unterrichtsreform durch ergeb-nisorientierte Steuerung, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften: Wiesbaden: 155-173 Huckle, J.; Wals, A. E.J. (2015): The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: business as usual in the end? In: Environmental Education Research, 21 (3): 491-505. Hursh, D.; Henderson, J. (2011): Contesting Global Neoliberalism and Creating Alternative Futures. In: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32 (2): 171–185 . Ioannidou, A. (2010): Educational monitoring and reporting as governance instruments for evidence-based education policy. In: International Perspectives on Education and Society, September 2010. Krippendorff, K. (2004): Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology, 2nd ed., Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks. Læssøe, J., Feinstein, N. W.; Blum, N. (2013): Environmental Education Policy Research –Challenges and Ways Research Might Cope with Them. In: Environmental Education Research 19 (2): 231–242. McKenzie, M.; Bieler, A.; McNeil, R. (2015): Education Policy Mobility: Reimagining Sustainability in Neoliberal times. In: Envi-ronmental Education Research 21 (3): 319–337. Meadows, D. 1999. Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Hartland: The Sustainability Institute. Meuser, M.; Nagel, U. (2009): Das Experteninterview – konzeptionelle Grundlagen und methodische Anlage. In: Pickel, S.; Pickel, G.; Lauth, H.-J.; Jahn, D. (Ed.): Methoden der vergleichenden Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften. VS Verlag für Sozi-alwissenschaften: Wiesbaden: 465-479. Nazir, J.; Pedretti, E.; Wallace, J.; Montemurro, D.; Inwood, H. (2009): Climate Change and Sustainable Development: The Response from Education. The Canadian Perspective. Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Van Poeck K.; Lysgaard J. A. (2016): The roots and routes of environmental and sustainability education policy research. In: Environmental Education Research, 22(3): 305-318. Wiek, A.; Lang, D. J. (2016): Transformational Sustainability Research Methodology. In: Heinrichs, H.; Martens, P.; Michelsen, G.; Wiek, A. (Ed..): Sustainability Science: An Introduction. Springer: Dordrecht: 31-41.

Author Information

Mandy Singer-Brodowski (presenting / submitting)

Freie Universität Berlin

Berlin

Nadine Etzkorn (presenting)

Freie University Berlin

Institut Futur

Berlin

Antje Brock

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.