Building on symposia at the ECER network 30 in 2023 (Lysgaard & Gericke, 2023) and 2024 (Lysgaard & Tryggvason, 2024) this presentation attempts to synthesize findings and conceptualize and model the qualities of green transition teaching within the broader field of ESE, ESD and eco-literacy research. The point of departure is an elaboration of prior research and policy work on ESE/ESD teaching quality frameworks (Mogensen, Breiting, & Mayer, 2005; UN, 2015) and their imagined and real practical implications for local school systems across the globe. We critically discuss whether one universal model for ESE teaching could be established (Laugesen & Elf, 2023; Lysgaard & Bengtsson, 2020) and argue that a more situated and pluralistic understanding of ESE teaching sensitive to local school traditions, potentials and constraints is probably more viable.

Based on a large-scale empirical research project in Northern Europe (Laugesen & Elf, 2023) as well as a range of smaller, linked international case studies, the presentation, focuses on how different concepts and practices of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) can be identified, understood and further developed in schools and in and across school subjects while also considering ecosystemic aspects. A key feature of this presentation is that it focuses on exploring qualities in actual teaching in an empirical sense (i.e. drawing on substantial qualitative and quantitative data) in conversation with what is and has been considered both historically and theoretically ‘good’ quality teaching, in a more normative sense.

Throughout the development of the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) there has been a steady influx of implicit and explicit understandings of quality as a way of deliberate on the core, emphases and parameters of associated education and teaching (Poeck & Lysgaard, 2016; Poeck, Öhman, & Östman, 2019). From the foregrounding of ‘facts, knowledge and behavior’ via critiques drawing on a German-Nordic Bildung-infused focus on critical thinking and democratic participation (Mogensen et al., 2005) to more recent post-anthropocentric perspectives (Lysgaard, Bengtsson, & Laugesen, 2019; Paulsen, 2021), ESE theory and practice continue to be both highly contextualized and contested in relation to local and national educational structures and environmental and sustainability concerns (Greer, Walshe, Kitson, & Dillon, 2024). Equally, the ongoing mainstreaming tendencies within the field, particularly within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG4 on Quality Education (United Nations, 2015), highlight the importance of developing a more nuanced language of which notions of quality are relevant and prioritized, how these might imperil or strengthen policy, practice and research-based understandings of the field, and how they could be taken up in by practitioners and resonate with practice.

The presentation focuses on how a diversity of concepts and practices of quality in teaching and education within the field of ESE can be identified, understood and developed further. This presentation builds on the earlier ECER NW 30 symposia in order to explore the key question of: How can we understand quality education and, more specifically, quality teaching in light of environmental and sustainability education, and what might be the qualities of green transition teaching in educational practice?

This presentation is an effort to synthesize the work done throughout the project Green Transition in Lower-Secondary Education (2021–2025) and present the key findings and critical observations from the study. As an epistemological point of departure, the presentation draws on key insights from pragmatist philosophies of education (Dewey, 1916) that emphasize the experiential and communicative nature of quality in education and teaching. In brief, from this perspective, quality is experienced and appraised in specific communicative settings (e.g. problem-based teaching) by someone (e.g. student, teacher) about something (e.g. subject matter) in order to be the quality that it is. Quality is thus not considered to exist objectively, in and of itself (Wittek & Kvernbekk, 2011); moreover, such a conceptualization of quality means it eludes reduction to forms of measurement by singular quantitative or qualitative processes (Berliner, 2005; Dahler-Larsen, 2019). Rather, quality must be inferred interpretatively from qualitative and quantitative insights drawing on multiple and mixed methods of research and evaluation (Stake, 1995) This perspective is the foundation for the foundational empirical work that the presentation draws on: Large-scale qualitative and quantitative empirical work based in Danish primary and lower secondary schools emphasizing both student and teacher perspectives on notions of quality in ESE teaching.

This presentation is part of an effort to open up discussions of quality education and teaching in the context of ESE research and practice reflecting a planetary biodiversity and climate crisis that has been known for decades. Thus we will engage with diverse interests in the intended/prescriptive, experienced, and documented aspects of quality in ESE. Coupled to this is close attention to how cross-disciplinarity as well as mono-disciplinary/subject-specific ESE qualities are conceptualized and analyzed (Kumar, 2010) for these times and horizons. Thus a key ambition is to explore not only how intended and documented aspects of quality have been the main focus of large parts of the ESE research field, but also the value of exploring the experienced and perceived aspects of quality in ESE for the further development of the field, grounded in empirical and conceptual explorations of real world cases highlighting student voices among others. On a more practical note, we argue that the genres of ‘white papers’ and school-oriented recommendations and tools for practice development should be revised acknowledging the more messy, non-linear, even dark pedagogy of (Lysgaard et al., 2019) ESE.

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