Today’s climate changed world is marked by gender, racial and global inequalities whereby the least responsible for climate change are often the most negatively impacted.  Global justice issues involve questions about “common but differentiated responsibilities” (UNFCCC, 2015) for the future of the globe and raise implications for classroom practice. UNSDG target 4.7 and the national curriculum in Sweden call for teaching of global justice issues (GJI) in ways that explicitly take-up ethical issues and that support action for structural change. Despite a general policy consensus on the importance of supporting students to deeply consider ethical and political concerns around responsibilities, there is a lack of sustained research about how teachers can engage with ethical issues of systemic inequalities in day-to-day practice in classrooms. An approach informed by decolonial perspectives (Mignolo, 2011; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) provides theoretical and conceptual resources to make visible how educational initiatives can unintentionally reproduce the unequal power relations at the heart of the GJI. Applied pedagogically, researchers suggest decolonial frameworks can support teachers to engage critical perspectives in their framing of and didactic treatment of GJIs (Andreotti, 2014; Stein & Andreotti, 2021). However, introducing critical perspectives that directly address colonial imbalances of power in formal educational contexts also raises tensions between (normative) demands for a break with existing processes sustaining structural inequalities and unsustainable lifestyles on the one hand, and curriculum calls for objectivity and pluralistic participative approaches on the other. Engaging ethically with complex GJI, and unpacking how these are framed, studied, and solved takes time and requires a fundamental rethink of education. How/can decolonial praxis support teachers to navigate the tensions between critical and normative perspectives and a concern with balanced perspectives or plurality of perspectives in the curriculum? Building from the established expertise in pluralistic and decolonial approaches, our new project A decolonial approach to teaching global justice issues (DecoPrax 2022-2026) engages these tensions as pedagogical imperatives. DecoPrax connects teachers’ practice to emerging scholarship informed by decolonial theory in intersections of critical global citizenship and environmental and sustainability education. Working with teachers who are interested in exploring decolonial praxis, our project aim is to explore, design, and co-create with teachers an educational framework informed by decolonial perspectives and rooted in the lived realities of classrooms. Our project will work with a group of 16 upper secondary teachers over three years. We will be engaging the group with workshops on decolonial concepts and pedagogy, visiting classrooms to observe and capture teacher reflections on applying decolonial praxis, and co-developing a resource. In order to set up the workshops and to gain insight into the context of practice, the first stage of the project seeks to identify possibilities and areas of constraints in curriculum and institutional contexts, and this is the focus of our ECER 2023 paper. Specifically, this paper explores: What are teachers’ institutional possibilities and barriers related to taking on a decolonial (critical) approach to GJI?

This first stage of research is in progress having started in September 2022 and to be completed in June 2023. We seek to identify areas of possibility and constraint for decolonial praxis in the teaching of GJIs in curriculum and institutional contexts through two related data sets; curriculum documents (national and local) and focus group interviews. In this paper we focus on the latter. We have conducted four pre-workshop group interviews to identify key characteristics of the institutional contexts in which teachers experience working with GJI and their views on taking a decolonial approach to critical engagement. These focus groups allow informants to explore the subject in dialogue from many angles, capturing key aspects of the complex contexts in which they teach. The conversations generate understandings that are useful to both participants and researchers (Cameron, 2005). All the interviews are audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed, with a specific attention to confrontations between the different discourses in play (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The analysis of the interview data will begin with coding for all instances of key possibilities and tensions which characterise the institutional context within which teachers introduce a critical perspective in curriculum and pedagogy and identifying key aspects. Our analysis of these key aspects will draw on Bryan’s (2022) ‘pedagogy of implicatedness’ as a responsibility framework to promote deeper understanding of the climate crisis in a continuity perspective as we consider these findings in relation to what steps are necessary and in what order might teachers pedagogically engage students with implication. We have begun initial analyses of the data and can share some early findings. Some key findings that are similar and/or unique across the teachers and/or schools relate to the following: curriculum (national level and how taken up in schools/classrooms), institutional culture (school traditions, school leadership, teaching traditions, extra-curricular set-up), student demographics (generational opportunities and challenges), reflexive pedagogy (how pedagogy can be designed to problematise ethical concern), wider findings (relating to the nature of GJIs more broadly). At the conference these findings will be more deeply explicated with examples from the teacher interviews. We will also raise overall key implications of the findings for the next stages of the research (workshops and school visits).

Teaching GJI presents unique challenges and opportunities. Our participants are teachers who are already committed to and interested in exploring decolonial praxis. We aim to co-create resourcing to support a wider engagement. In focus groups, these teachers see the national curriculum calls for teaching of GJIs as supporting explicitly taking-up ethical issues and including a plurality of perspectives, and promoting action for (structural) change. Thus, the curriculum presents a possibility for radical and critical perspectives. Yet, teachers mention that it is hard to integrate sustainability into an overcrowded subject curriculum. Teachers also indicate constraints from institutional aspects (schools with old traditions) and teaching traditions that work against more critical approaches. Across the sample, they articulate a tough balance between engaging students responsibly with GJI and avoiding doom-and-gloom. These teachers are dealing with students’ emotional responses to (the threat of) climate change and are innovating around this actively. While many students are interested in GJIs, they can disengage when increasingly urgent questions of appropriateness of responsibility become too close or too hard. Teachers are grappling with how to pedagogically engage with responsibility to take action while recognising the need for systemic change and being appropriate to students’ actual sphere of influence. Furthermore, teachers indicate it is easier to teach facts on subject content as criticality and to see different perspectives requires more preparation and takes time though they do find ways. Teachers themselves must have a complex understanding to pedagogically respond to issues students raise in class in relation to the material. The DecoPrax project represents an opportunity to respond to some of these challenges in the next stages of the project and to connect conceptual resources from decolonial theory with the expertise of these teachers.

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