The global sustainability crisis calls for citizens with improved awareness, understanding and ability to take action against threatening challenges in society and in everyday life. Policymakers worldwide take initiatives that call on schools and teachers to contribute to this by implementing environmental and sustainability education (ESE) (e.g. UNESCO, 2017, SDG4, target 4.7). One of the educational innovations that schools are invited to implement, is so-called "open schooling", i.e. educational practices in schools that have an explicit ambition to identify, explore and tackle sustainability problems in the local community. The goal in open schooling is for schools to work in collaboration with local stakeholders, authorities, associations, businesses, etc. to contribute to constructive solutions to sustainability issues. Earlier didactic research has shown how policy-driven innovations can be challenging for teachers because they require a departure from habitual ways of thinking and acting. Many studies in science education have shown that implementation of policy innovations is a very complicated process in relation to for example teachers’ beliefs (see for example Wallace & Priestley 2011). Regarding teachers’ common way of teaching Lidar et al. (2020), for instance, show how the introduction of external examinations in primary school meant that teachers had to re-evaluate their teaching habits and coordinate their teaching to fit the new requirements. In relation to sustainability education Leemans (2022) argues that implementing a ‘whole school approach’, as UNESCO (2021) and governments (e.g. Onderwijsinspectie 2017) call for, challenges everyday routines in a class, school, and local community before such an education innovation can become part of the normal course of events.

In this paper, we identify and discuss several kinds of difficulties that teachers may experience in implementing policy-driven educational innovation through an explorative case study of open schooling practices in Sweden and Belgium. In particular, we investigate how schools implement open schooling through LORET - Locally Relevant Teaching (Östman et al. 2013), a methodology to plan locally relevant sustainable development teaching that is adapted to local needs/conditions while also allowing to teach subject knowledge and realize curriculum objectives. Our object of study is the design processes of teaching in workshops where educational researchers and teachers collaborate to co-produce LORET-based open schooling practices.

The paper is theoretically inspired by transactional theory on sustainability learning (Östman et al. 2019) based on the pragmatist work of John Dewey (1916, 1938) who approaches learning ‘transactionally’ (Dewey & Bentley 1949), i.e. as a consequence of individuals' coordination processes with the physical, social and institutional environment. A transactional learning theory posits that learning occurs in response to a ‘problematic situation’ (Dewey 1929). A problematic situation occur when  our habitual ways of thinking and acting is disturbed: when we can’t continue as usual with the activity we are involved in.  When encountering a problematic situation, we engage in inquiry through experimentation in order to find a solution, which can result in the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, values, identities, and so on. This process may involve a transformation of habits or the development of new habits. As such, pragmatism’s processual approach to the phases of habit, crisis and creativity that mark human action (Shilling 2008) offers us a useful framework to investigate how didactic innovation involves the disturbance of teaching habits.

Our analysis of the disturbance of teaching habits incited by the introduction of a new open schooling methodology is guided by the following research questions:

1. Which problematic situations occur?  
2. What creates these problematic situations, in other words, which are the habits that are disturbed?

We present an explorative qualitative case study of LORET workshops in 5 diverse schools: one Swedish primary school (pupils in year 5 and 6, 11-12 years old, working on the issue of waste and recycling), one Swedish secondary school (students in their first year at the Social Science program, 16-17 years old, working on diverse issues in different groups, e.g. recycling of clothes and inter-generational dialogue on SDGs), one Belgian primary school (pupils from preschool to year 6, 2,5-12 years old working on the issue of sustainable food), and two Belgian secondary schools (one with students in their fourth and fifth year at the STEAM program, 15-17 years old, working on the issues of water and electricity, and one with students in the fourth and sixth year of diverse programs, 15-18 years old, working on the issue of sustainable food). In each location a teacher team with different subject specialties and interests took part. Additionally, a team of facilitators with backgrounds as educational researchers participated in the workshops. One facilitator had the overarching responsibility for leading the workshops in the Swedish schools, another one in the Belgian schools. The meetings took place in person or online (zoom, Teams), were recorded and lasted for between 45-240 minutes. The empirical material was gathered through observations and (individual and group) interviews. Our strategy of analysis was to first listen to the recordings of observations and interviews and take notes. We identified, on the one hand, problematic situations that became visible as a 'gap' (Wickman and Östman 2002) in the ongoing conversations through for example hesitations, questions, a sigh, disagreement on how to continue, etc. and, on the other hand, problematic situations that were voiced by respondents during the interviews. After each recording we discussed the identified “problematic situations” in teams of at least two researchers. All problematic situations we agreed on were transcribed and analyzed in order to determine how they occurred, i.e. through the disturbance of which teaching habits and customs. Subsequently, determining similarities and differences between the identified problematic situations and discussing these repeatedly with the entire research team resulted in a categorization of 9 types of problematic situations.

We identified different types of problematic situations: 1. Difficulties to plan lessons starting from a sustainability challenge 2. A lack of content expertise 3. Difficulties to take the students along in an authentic quest for solutions 4. Difficulties to define and coordinate the roles of teachers and non-school partners 5. Difficulties to create tailor-made lesson plans and teaching materials 6. Difficulties to cope with the workload 7. Organizational issues 8. Difficulties to document lesson plans 9. Difficulties to manage the students’ working process Even though there were common problematic situations brought about by the introduction of LORET differed considerably across contexts , such as a shared struggle to organize lessons that take students along in an authentic quest for solving the sustainability problem at hand, there were also differences in terms of the occurrence of problematic situations as well as in the sort of habits that were disturbed. These differences were related to different national educational contexts, diverse school culture/organization/policies, variety in individual teachers’ habits, and differences in students’ characteristics (e.g. age). Our explorative study draws attention to the impact of policy-driven innovations on everyday teaching practices and sheds light on some considerations to take into account when installing or facilitating education innovation initiatives. It shows the importance of flexibility and of facilitators being attentive to differences in the problematic situations that are experienced in order to come up with tailored strategies to overcome these. We also observed how paying attention to how teachers’ and schools’ routines are disturbed can result in making changes in habits and customs so that obstacles can be overcome in case this is considered worthwhile. We hope that this explorative study may inspire future research in this topic to validate the findings and gaining more in-depth insight in, for example, how problematic situations can be overcome.

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