What’s worth teaching in environmental and sustainability education (ESE)? There are many different competencies that can be addressed (Vare et al., 2022). One of the common themes in ESE is pollution and waste. I argue that students should not only understand the magnitude of environmental problems but also possible solutions to these problems and their own action competence to deal with them (Collins, 2017: 74; Sass et al., 2020). I will discuss how to qualify the teaching and learning of rubbish as just one example of doing ESE in the Danish primary and secondary school. The main research question is: What are the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogy of rubbish? In a Danish context there has been an earlier attempt to develop a pedagogy of rubbish formulated by Jørgensen et al. (2018). My aim of this paper is to unfold some of the theoretical ideas by discussing how Thompsons (1979) theory of rubbish, and the expansion of it by Engeström & Blackler (2005), can be applied to a pedagogy of rubbish. I will also discuss how the practices of reduction, reuse and recycling of rubbish can become part of the everyday life of Danish schools using examples from an ongoing empirical study about the quality dimensions of ESE. An argument is to view a pedagogy of rubbish in a broader perspective of a pedagogy of things (Nohl, 2011) and students’ valuation of things in their performativity (Nohl & Wulf, 2013).

Collins, A. (2017). What's Worth Teaching? Rethinking Curriculum in the Age of Technology. New York: Teachers College Press. Engeström, Y. & Blackler, F. (2005). On the Life of the Object. Organization, 12, 3, 307-330. Jørgensen, N.J., Madsen, K.D. & Læssøe, J. (2018). Waste in education: the potential of materiality and practice. Environmental Education Research, 24, 6, 807-817. Nohl, A. (2011). Pädagogik der Dinge. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Nohl, A. & Wulf, C. (2013). Die Materialität pädagogischer Prozesse zwischen Mensch und Ding. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 16, 1-13. Sass, W., Pauw, J.B., Olsson, D., Gericke, N., Maeyer, S.D. & Petegem, P.V. (2020). Redefining action competence: The case of sustainable development. The Journal of Environmental Education, 51, 4, 292-305. Thompson, M. (1979). Rubbish theory: The creation and destruction of value. Oxford University Press. Vare, P., Lausselet, N. & Rieckmann, M. (Eds.) (2022). Competences in Education for Sustainable Development: Critical Perspectives. Springer.