Relevance

Late-modern societies are confronted with the task to find a way out of unsustainability which ultimately makes learning a task for society as a whole (UNESCO, 2013; Van Poeck et al., 2018). Educational processes in the context of sustainability and citizenship education are challenging for several reasons. Regarding the contents of learning, complex issues must be communicated, interdisciplinary knowledge must be integrated and uncertainty about the “right way” must be endured. This complexity is potentiated not least through its sociality and perspectivity. The learning subject is politically addressed within the context of education for sustainable development. Enabling learners to participate in society and to take action for sustainable development also means supporting them in their political decision-making.

Theoretical framework

As a cross-curricular educational task, education for sustainable development has to be integrated in all subjects. To achieve this, different didactic approaches can be appropriate. For topics that negotiate the political, economic and social dimensions, a “pluralistic perspective” (Öhman, 2008; Östmann, 2010) is highly connectable. Moreover, reconstructive studies show that promoting co-construction processes of the students and the discursive exchange on different positions in class is more efficient than explicit or implicit moral appeals which are more likely to be rejected by students (Asbrand & Wettstätt, 2014). Learning for sustainability goes beyond the mere transfer of knowledge and focuses on the students as political subjects with their attitudes, ideas and beliefs (Block et al., 2019). Learning as a process of meaning-making (Östman et al., 2019) takes this into consideration. The didactic approach of the so-called “citizenship consciousness” (Lange, 2008) also follows the idea that students’ ideas about political and social reality produce meaning, which enables the individual to orient and act in the world. Learners introduce their ideas into the educational settings, although little is known about the processes that take place to create political meaning around sustainability.

Conceptual framework

Based on the socio-constructivist assumption that dealing with opposing points of view leads to cognitive conflicts and thus further development or reorganization of one's own cognitive structures (Piaget, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978), a  seven-week learning unit on "Global transformation as reflected in the region: What should agriculture of the future look like?" was conducted in three political education courses in the upper secondary school and evaluated in an intervention study. One didactic focus was to make the systemic lines of conflict perceptible in their regional relevance (Östman et al., 2019). Therefore, out-of-school meetings with regional actors (local farmers and representatives of an NGO) were integrated to show and discuss conflicting perspectives on the topic.

Research questions

Based on these theoretical assumptions, the question arises which processes of reflection and meaning-making were initiated by the learning unit and to what extent the learners succeed in meaningfully abstracting the concrete experience of the out-of-school encounters in the context of a political and social reality and gaining political insights.

The study should provide answers to the following research questions:

1. Which processes of reflection were initiated by the teaching project and what role do the out-of-school encounters play in this?
2. Which political processes of meaning-making can be reconstructed in the learners' reflections?

In order to explore longer-term processes of political meaning-making, episodic interviews (Flick, 2011) were conducted six weeks after the end of the intervention in class with a total of eleven students. The format of the episodic interview focuses on experiences in a subjective and meaning-making perspective and is based on the assumption of distinction between semantic and episodic knowledge: While semantic knowledge is built around concepts and their relationships to one another, episodic knowledge consists of memories of situations. Therefore, an interview guideline was developed that combines open questioning and narrative to take both forms of knowledge and their connection in meaning-making into account. The interview is structured in two parts: First, students describe and reflect on their learning process, asking what they particularly remember and how their view on the discussed issues has developed. The next part focuses on memories of the controversial out-of-school encounters; students are asked to share their insights and transfer them to other complex issues on sustainability. A qualitative evaluation will be performed through content analysis (Kuckartz, 2018) and analysis of argumentation (Kuhn & Udell, 2007; Petrik, 2011). In the first evaluation phase, case portraits are developed, followed by reconstructions of the students' meaning-making in their reflections in the next stage.

The results presented illustrate the didactic potential of out-of-school forms of learning, but also draw attention to possible problems and pitfalls. The students describe the out-of-school- encounters with the regional farmers and environmental activists as significant for their personal learning and judgment process; the descriptions show an experience of relevance and resonance. The political meaning generated in the context of the real encounters differs greatly between the individual students, since the out-of-school experience is encoded and decoded in the light of their own preconceptions and in conformity with pre-existent opinion. In the reflections of the students, the regional actors function as evidence for their own opinions. The results are to be discussed with regard to didactic implications for the integration of out-of-school experiences in political education. To avoid a “naïve” pedagogy of experience, taking up the interplay between induction and deduction afterwards in school and initiating a pluralistic discourse about the experiences is crucial in order to break up the supposed unambiguity of the out-of-school experience that shapes some students' meaning-making.

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