What should education be about? In the North European tradition of Didaktik this question has been discussed as the content problem in education. In this paper, we explore the selection and framing of content in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) and discuss the consequences for students’ understanding of sustainability issues and citizenship. Our analysis is based on data from a research-based evaluation project of the Norwegian curriculum renewal LK20 where we have studied how lower and upper secondary schools carry out interdisciplinary sustainability education.

Our study of the role of content in ESE is inspired by Klafki’s argument about the importance of letting current societal challenges become a part of education with reference to «the key problems that globally interweave our individual and political-societal existence» (Klafki 1996: 154, our translation). Klafki identified epochal problems concerning peace, environmental problems, social inequity, information technology, and experiences of love and sexuality. His contribution may be seen as an expression of ESE developed within the frame of a critical Bildung ideal (Kvamme & Sæther, 2019; Kvamme, 2021).

When students are learning about and forming opinions about epochal problems in school, they are also developing understandings of what their citizenship entails. Selection and framing of ESE content convey representations of the “we” that students are being associated with. ESE content also charts causal connections, responsibilities and possible ways of engaging as a citizen. Of particular interest to us is how young people’s citizenship (Hartung, 2017; Ideland, 2018, Hayward, 2020) is being conceptualized in ESE content

Sharing a predominant concern within the ESE research field and a pedagogy of place, in our analysis we are attentive to expressions of students’ situatedness (Greenwood, 2013) and how educational practices accommodate student experiences and their relations to place. We are also curious about how school subject knowledge are brought in and may provide new perspectives, expanding and transforming the students’ understandings of themselves and the world they are a part of, involving not only a cognitive, but also an affective and emotional dimension (Verlie, 2019). Here we adhere to an extension of the hermeneutical tradition “whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being” (Ricoeur 1981: 44). The emphasis on school subject knowledge is a concern we share with the strand of current educational research that refers to powerful knowledge (Young, 2008; Young and Muller, 2013). However, unlike this approach, we emphasize the significance of contextual knowledge and address the relationship between situatedness and distantiation (Kvamme, 2024). Furthermore, we problematize the clear distinction between values and knowledge that have been proposed by Young and colleagues. Particularly in school, content knowledge is always linked to processes of valuing, giving priority to something at the expense of something else that is left out. The processes of complexity reduction and the role of interdisciplinarity (Biesta 2010; Jones, Selby & Sterling, 2010) are also important aspects of our analysis.

Our data is from the research-based evaluation project EVA2020 where we study the curriculum renewal process which was put into practice in Norwegian schools in 2020 and onwards. Within this project, we have followed interdisciplinary teaching units on democracy and citizenship, public health and life skills, and sustainable development. In this reform sustainable development as an interdisciplinary topic is explicitly addressed both in the general curriculum and a majority of the subject curricula. We have extensive video recordings of whole class and group interaction and have conducted audio recorded interviews with students, teachers and school leadership. The recordings have been transcribed and in our analyses we are primarily relating to the transcripts. Our data also consist of teaching material and student products including presentations, posters and texts. In this paper, we have selected data from the two schools that foreground sustainable development in their interdisciplinary teaching, studying educational practices carried out in 2022 and 2023. The first school is an upper secondary school with participation from 15-16 year old students, while the other is a lower secondary school with 14-15 year old students. We approach the data through a critical hermeneutical perspective (Ricoeur, 1981) to bring out how content is constructed by teachers and students and how explanations of sustainability issues as well as notions of place, belonging and citizenship are construed in the classrooms. In the material we identify incidents that appear to be particularly striking or surprising, with regard to our research interest, seen as “crystallization of a problem related to the basic question” (Knauth, 2009, p. 24). This approach also involves a sensitivity for hegemonic imaginaries in play. A central concern is to explore how the educational practices open up for new self-understanding and a space for practices of citizenship.

The teaching of sustainability at the schools we analyze in this paper is structured around projects where the students are encouraged to actively seek and establish knowledge about sustainability issues, often starting with an Internet search for digital sources . In these project practices, we see two contrasting approaches. At one school, the teaching design emphasizes individual experiences connected to sustainability, determining the content that is brought in, such as food habits and consumption patterns. The other school places sustainability problems at the center of the teaching design, for instance plastic in the ocean. Despite the contrasting approaches, students at both schools are exposed to quite limited representations of sustainability issues. The potential knowledge contributions from the different school subjects are not fully utilized in the interdisciplinary teaching design. Partly this tendency is expressed in a teacher role that, while supporting the students in their priorities and choices, is less concerned with introducing content that position the students’ works in a larger societal, political and ecological context. We find examples where subject content stimulates students to form and formulate views on sustainability issues, such as genetically modified organisms. However, with reference to Ricoeur’s (1981) critical hermeneutics, students are not provided access to perspectives that enable a critical understanding of the issues in question, cf. Ricoeur’s notion of distantiation. Conflictual aspects of sustainability are seldom brought up, and the students do not recognize possible responses that go beyond changes in individual behavior. As a consequence, the political aspects of sustainability do not become visible for the students, and the educational practices do not stand out as transformative. Both in the educational practices and in the student interviews, it rarely appears as something is really at stake, neither prompting existential responses concerning their lives nor encouraging active citizenship.

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