This symposium is the result of a collaboration in the context of an international scientific network on the public role of education in relation to democratic sustainability transitions. The network brings together researchers from universities in Sweden, Ireland, and Belgium with the aim to progress theory development and research on this topic. Drawing on both educational theory and empirical research, the participants engage with the question how education can play a democratic role in addressing sustainability challenges.

Facing the impotence of existing decision-making institutions and routines to tackle sustainability problems adequately (Marres 2005), appeals have been made to education and ‘learning’ as a driver for sustainable development. This is, for instance, reflected in UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Giannini’s statement that ‘Education for Sustainable Development can provide the knowledge, awareness and action that empower people to transform themselves and transform societies’ (UNESCO 2020, p. 2). Also outside formal education, the transition to a more sustainable world is often understood as a matter of learning (Stam et al. 2023). Thus, political spaces in which people strive for social justice and ecological sustainability are considered to be also educative spaces, settings for much-needed education.

The relation between public education and societal transformation has since long been the subject of a lively discussion in educational scholarship. Today, besides an increasing number of studies that aim to grasp, describe, and prescribe how education can effectively contribute to tackling societal problems there is a vibrant field of scholarship engaged in criticising an instrumental perspective on the relation between education, learning, and the solution of social problems such as sustainability crises (Masschelein & Simons 2013, Todd 2016, Van Poeck & Östman 2020). Authors theorise what it can mean to take a pedagogical perspective on the public sphere (Bergdahl & Langmann 2021) and how to understand the democratic role of education (Säfström 2021) and empirically investigate the preconditions and implications thereof (e.g. Rudsberg & Öhman, Van Poeck & Östman 2018).

In the network, we aim to progress this area of scholarship by exploring questions such as: What are vital conditions or obstacles for education to democratically address sustainability challenges? How to understand ‘public’, ‘education’, ‘democracy’, and ‘sustainability’ and their relations? What does this imply for designing educational practices? And for educational research? How to understand the similarities, differences, boundaries and interrelatedness of political and educative spaces? The papers we will present and discuss in this symposium address the network’s topic from three different perspectives.

In paper 1, the authors address the precariousness of life today and associated democratic challenges and draw on Rancière’s notion of ‘perceptual shock’ to expand our sense of what ‘equality’ and the ‘public’ can mean and to conceptualise the democratic task of education as creating a ‘perceptual shock’ needed to world the world anew.

Paper 2 focuses on the risk of blurring education with activism, and addressing sustainability issues without a concrete experiential reference point in the world. The author develops a philosophical argument drawing on the concepts of ‘wicked problems’, ‘public things’, and ‘matters of care’ and empirically explores this with an example of a Swedish classroom.

Paper 3 takes us to Belgium. The authors study a political setting – a consultation process about sustainable mobility – in search of conditions for the emergence of an educative space and time within such gatherings of a public. They focus on how the settings’ design and facilitators’ actions enable or impede alternatives for omnipresent polarisation and deadlock related to sustainability issues.

Bergdahl, L., Langmann, E. 2022. Pedagogical Publics: Creating Sustainable Educational Environments in Times of Climate Change. European Educational Research Journal, 21(3), 405-418. Marres, N. 2005. No Issue, No Public. Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Masschelein, J., Simons, M. 2013. In Defence of the School. A Public Issue. Education, Culture & Society Publishers. Rudsberg, K, Öhman, J. 2010. Pluralism in Practice – Experiences from Swedish Evaluation, School Development and Research. Environmental Education Research, 16(1), 95-111. Säfström, C.A. 2021. A Pedagogy of Equality in a Time of Unrest. Strategies for an Ambiguous Future. Routledge. Stam, K., van Ewijk, E., Chan, P.W. 2023. How does learning drive sustainability transitions? Perspectives, problems and prospects from a systematic literature review. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 48. Todd, S. 2016. New Ethical Challenges Within Environmental and Sustainability Education: A Response, Environmental Education Research, 22(6), 842–844. UNESCO. 2020. Education for sustainable development: A roadmap. Paris. Van Poeck, K., Östman, L. 2020. The Risk and Potentiality of Engaging with Sustainability Problems in Education—A Pragmatist Teaching Approach. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 1003-1018. Van Poeck, K., Östman, L. 2018. Creating Space for ‘the Political’ in Environmental and Sustainability Education Practice: A Political Move Analysis of Educators’ Actions. Environmental Education Research, 24(9), 1406-1423.