This paper investigates challenges students face in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) practices in the form of ‘open schooling’ (OS), i.e. connecting education to identifying, exploring, and tackling sustainability problems in the school or the local community (European Commission, 2022; Van Poeck et al., 2024) The latter become the starting point of learning, where knowledge from school subjects assist in understanding and solving the problem. In this study an OS practice is implemented using a method called LORET (local relevant teaching)  (Östman et al., 2013).

Researchers have observed how ESE practices like open schooling disrupt regular schooling practices. The conditions which create these tensions are referred to as the rhetoric-reality gap in ESE literature as the intended purpose of traditional schooling collides with the visionary purposes of EE (Stevenson, 2007). The gap highlights the disconnect between status-quo values that mainstream schooling operates within with a focus on task solving, assessment and production of school work, and the visionary goals of environmental education which calls for open-ended problem solving and transform the status-quo. (Stevenson, 2007; Vare & Burch, 2024).

Previous research in ESE shows that open schooling disrupts teachers’ habitual ways of thinking and acting. Van Poeck et al. (2024) show how teachers  experienced difficulties (‘problematic situations’) in, for example, planning lessons around a sustainability challenge, taking students on an authentic quest for solutions, and planning lessons before knowing what students’ input will be.

Previous research on students’ experiences of novel ESE interventions similar to open-schooling remain sparse, especially in relation to how it may disrupt their existing habits. Vare (2021) studied how students responded to practical, student-led, community-based projects. He demonstrated how they appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of problem solving which provided them with a multidimensional view of the problem, to imagine and develop their ideas further and how it disturbed their habit of addressing problems of a simulative nature with prescriptive solutions in order to learn to apply concepts. In the study by Tayne (2022) students reflected on the kinds of action they engaged in as part of a sustainability unit of civic and community action projects. Students struggled with keeping to timelines, communication with community outside school, and felt that their projects were not feasible. They appreciated the collaborative aspects of the project where they solved problems as a group rather than ‘going at it alone’.

 The aim of the study presented in this paper is to investigate the challenges students face within OS practices in relation to their existing schooling habits . We draw on in-situ observations in an explorative case-study in a Swedish middle school.  

We use the transactional theory of learning by Östman et al. (2019), based on the pragmatist work of John Dewey (1916). In this theory learning is seen ‘transactionally’ as a consequence of an individual’s coordination processes with the environment. Learning is understood as being triggered by a problematic situation when our habitual ways  of thinking and acting  are disturbed by changes in our environment (Dewey, 1929). This change needs attention (cognitively and/or bodily) if we are to continue with the activity. We then engage in an “inquiry” which involves experimentations and making relations to existing knowledge, skills, values or creating new relations, leading to the creation of a new habit.  

The empirical questions that guide our study are:

1. What problematic situations occur when students engage in open schooling projects? 
2. Which habits of students, used in everyday school work, are disturbed in relation to the problematic situations identified?
3. How do students overcome these disturbances of habits and transform existing habits?

We present results from a case study in a Swedish middle school where the medium of instruction was English. The students belonged to the sixth grade and moved to the seventh grade in the course of the OS project. They were aged between 11-13 years old. Three teachers in a teacher team took part in three LORET workshops run by a team of educational researchers, to plan lessons for OS projects. The school implemented lessons on a project to conserve paper in the school by reducing consumption of printing paper, hand towels and toilet paper. The teachers planned the lessons and the students explored the problem in the school through the course of six lessons. The students then prepared a communication for the principal with specific measures for reducing paper consumption. The data was collected in the form of video-recorded observations, audio recordings during classroom teaching and focus group discussions with students. In addition to this we also collected lesson planning and assessment documents and presentations made by the teacher, as well as PowerPoint presentations and exams of the students. Twenty four of the 104 students who were part of the lessons were part of the focus group discussions. The analysis process involved watching and listening to video and audio recordings and taking notes. We investigate problematic situations as spoken by students during focus group discussions (in hindsight) and those expressed as a ‘gap’ during observations. For this we used Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA), which was developed for analyzing meaning-making in educational contexts (Wickman & Östman, 2002). The method investigates meaning as it is created and transformed in and by action. ‘Gaps’ in meaning occur when participants encounter a new situation, which must be bridged. Participants stop the action and this causes a disruption. This disruption of usual habits is expressed and becomes visible as hesitation, disagreement, request to help, or by guessing. To bridge the gap participants create relations to previous experiences or acquired knowledge, skills, beliefs and values. All problematic situations were noted down separately, grouped into categories representing similar gaps and then related to disturbances of specific habits that students use in everyday school work. These disturbances impeded the flow of these activities in some way. We determined similarities and differences between problematic situations to identify different types.

The analysis shows that just like teachers, students encountered problematic situations in OS practices. We identified problematic situations occurring and students facing challenges in: 1. Coming up with workable solutions with real consequences going beyond thinking up plans; 2. Issues related to group dynamics and consensus building; 3. Insecurities related to how their solutions will be received by the management. This is a departure from their habits of working on finite, time-bound projects with prescriptive solutions. By shining a spotlight on problematic situations that students’ face in open schooling practices, the study contributes with knowledge about the challenges students face and the disturbances to their schooling practices. Through this paper we hope to fuel a discussion about how to support teachers in implementing open schooling and we hope that the results can help teachers to be conscious mentors to students’ in open schooling activities.

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