This paper reports on an on-going project where we follow sustainability education in an upper secondary school where the student group is composed of adults with a migrant background. In this school they are called “participants” rather than “pupils” to emphasize their status as adults. 

For the past three years the school has organized an interdisciplinary sustainability week where students and teachers spend all available time on project related activities. The topics for the sustainability week have been broad: “clothes”,“water” and “food”.

Diversity is the norm at this school, and the classrooms are filled with people talking together in many different languages, while Norwegian is being used as the teaching language. The participants’ Norwegian competency varies, but students need to pass a minimum competency level. When students and teachers learn about and explore sustainability issues during the sustainability week, they bring with them knowledge and experiences from previous education as well as multilingual language resources, concepts and vocabularies. They also enter a situation where they are to discuss complex issues across their differences in a language that only the teacher fully masters. This classroom context accentuates the complexity of sustainability issues education. Not only are the topics contentious and complicated in the way they connect micro and macro perspectives on society, nature, economy, politics and culture, but the didactical opportunity structure is contingent upon the linguistic and cultural diversity of the classroom. 

Our study is guided by three research questions, and we ask:

• which subject positions become available to the participants through the classroom discourse on sustainability?
• how are the participants' backgrounds and experiences expressed in the classroom?
• how is Norway constructed as an actor in relation to sustainable development?

One easily observable feature of sustainability discourse is the positioning of a broad, human ‘we’ who now face the crises caused by global warming and loss of biodiversity. This broadly formulated ‘we’ has been criticized for obscuring how global inequity and injustice position people in different places differently. Bylund and Knutsson (2020) show how sustainability education is conducted in ways that reflect and naturalize existing privileges and structures of (economic) domination and disadvantage. Pashby and Sund (2020) make a similar observation that Environmental and Sustainability Education reproduce a ‘we’ situated in the global north that is construed as providing knowledge of, and solutions to, problems of the Global South. Colonial path dependencies do have an impact also on education systems, and Andreotti (2016, p. 102) describes how the concept of the nation state is presented as a given and benevolent category that elevates it “to a place beyond critique”. In our study, we follow a classroom in the global north where the majority of the students have origins in the global south, which gives an opportunity to explore the construction of subject positions taking place in ESD and the characteristics ascribed to Norway’s practices and responsibility for sustainable development. The construction of subject positions taking place in classroom discourse will influence on the status of the participants’ knowledge and previous experiences from education, employment, politics and daily life in their countries of origin. To analyze the status and use of various knowledge sources, we draw on literature from multilingualism studies (García & Li, 2014). The concept of epistemic justice enables us to construct migrant students as knowers and producers of knowledge (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele, 2022). While multilingual approaches in education provide access in a language students master allowing them to make epistemic contributions, Kerfoot and Bello-Nonjengele (2022) argue that this is not enough to obtain epistemic justice as “hierarchies of value and relations of knowing [are left] unchallenged” (p. 3). 

The setting of our study is a formal adult education center in a large city in Norway. Students come from Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey, and are between 25 and 50 years old. All have obtained permanent residency, but their time in Norway varies from a few years to more than ten years. The teacher has long experience with teaching adult migrants. The paper is based on qualitative analysis of classroom observations in combination of interviews with student participants, teachers and school leadership. We were present in the classroom throughout the sustainability week organized at the school in 2023 and conducted interviews with selected participants and the main teacher for this class. Interviews with the school leadership have informed us about the upstart of the sustainability week in 2022, and for 2024 we will have a focus group with teachers to learn more about their perspectives. Our analyses are theoretically informed by literatures on multilingualism and environmental and sustainability education. Our analytical strategies build on poststructural discourse analysis (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) and center around concepts such as hegemony, signs, floating signifiers and subject positions.

We find several available subject positions articulated in classroom discourse. In group work and classroom discussions, the notion of the responsible citizen who contributes to sustainability by saving water is recurring. It is sometimes countered by the critical citizen who points out that without structural change, individual actions mean very little. Participants’ experiences from their countries of origin are often made sense of as part of a discourse on development rather than sustainability. One example is how it was necessary to save water, as water was a scarce resource. However, in the classroom context, the dominating student subject position appear to be as resident and part of Norwegian civil society. Previous knowledge, experiences and languages are recognized, but never positioned at the center of discussion. The Norwegian nation state is constructed as good and benevolent and as a contributor of technological knowledge and resources to the global south. Norwegian production of oil and gas and overconsumption are not being addressed.

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