Within the research field of environmental and sustainability education, there is widespread agreement that liveable lives for all human beings requires extensive societal transformations and involves less anthropocentric conceptualizations of the relationships between human beings and the more than human (Tannock, 2021). The concept of transformation connects what is to what could be, and bridges the descriptive, the normative and the political. In school, the teaching of sustainability issues confronts teachers with near infinite complexity and countless connections that they will have to grasp and reduce in order for their students to engage with sustainability issues in meaningful ways. Such complexity reduction (Biesta, 2010) does not only occur as an individual task for each teacher but takes place through the collective formation of teaching traditions (Öhman & Östman, 2019). A means for reducing complexity is also through professional collaboration and shared content where a broad range of actors, also from civil society organizations, take part. This contribution to the symposium presents an analysis of representations of sustainability in teaching material on sustainability education for lower secondary school developed by an NGO that has a strong standing and is widely used in Norwegian schools. The material consists of animation videos, texts and assignments and through a discourse analysis (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) I will explore how this teaching material explains what sustainability is about. Of particular interest is what the “we” established in these representations entail and how it positions human beings in relation to the more than human. Further, I will address the impact of the construction and delineation of sustainability pillars (environmental, economic and social) and how students’ agency is being described. The aim of the analysis is to come closer to an understanding of current teaching discourses on sustainability and to reflect on how the research field of ESE can contribute to this discourse through critique and alternative suggestions.

Biesta, G. (2010). Five theses on complexity reduction and its politics. In Complexity theory and the politics of education (pp. 5–13). Brill Sense. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2014). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics (Vol. 8). Verso Books. Tannock, S. (2021) Educating for radical social transformation in the climate crisis. Springer Nature, 2021.