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- Hasslöf, Helen, et al.
(författare)
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Critical thinking as room for subjectification in Education for Sustainable Development
- 2015
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Ingår i: Environmental Education Research. - Abingdon : Taylor & Francis. - 1350-4622 .- 1469-5871. ; 21:2, s. 239-255
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Issues of sustainability are complex and often steeped with ethical and political questions without predefined or general answers. This paper deals with how secondary and upper secondary teachers discuss these complex issues, by analysing their aims for Education for Sustainable Development. With inspiration from discourse theory, their articulations about students as political subjects are analysed. Critical thinking emerged as a nodal point in teachers’ discussions. In this study, critical thinking is articulated as having various qualitative meanings related to different epistemological views. On one hand, critical thinking is articulated to invite room for subjectification; but on the other hand, room for subjectification is challenged when critical thinking is articulated through the educational aims of qualification and socialisation. A consequence of changing epistemological view might be that political and ethical issues take a back seat.
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2. |
- Ideland, Malin, et al.
(författare)
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Governing ‘eco-certified children’ through pastoral power : critical perspectives on education for sustainable development
- 2015
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Ingår i: Environmental Education Research. - Abingdon, Oxon : Taylor & Francis. - 1350-4622 .- 1469-5871. ; 21:2, s. 173-182
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article analyses how ‘eco-certified children’ are constructed as desirable subjects in teaching materials addressing education for sustainable development. We are interested in how discourses structure this cherished practice and how this practice has become ‘natural’ and obvious for us. A discourse analysis is carried out by looking at the material through the lens of Foucault’s notion of pastoral power. The analysis departs from teaching material addressing issues on sustainable development: (1) textbooks for primary and secondary school; (2) games targeted at preschool and school children; and (3) children’s books about sustainable development. The results show that the discourse of education for sustainable development is characterized by scientific and mathematical objectiv- ity and faith in technological development. It emphasizes the right of the individ- ual and the obligation to make free, however ‘correct’, choices. In the teaching materials, the eco-certified child therefore emerges as knowing, conscious, rational, sacrificing and active. This child is constructed through knitting together personal guilt with global threats, detailed individual activities with rescuing the flock and the planet. In a concluding discussion, we discuss how ESD is framed in a neoliberal ideology. With the help of ESD, an economic discourse becomes dressed in an almost poetic language.
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