Relational and Critical Perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development

This volume focuses on the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), education, to look at sustainability from various angles with the purpose of challenging preconceptions about what sustainable education might entail and how it should be conducted. To this end, the book assembles scholars from various research fields and disciplines, who are willing to be at the cutting edge regarding sustainability and education on all levels with students in the ages of 6-15. Through this approach, the text points towards a “wild pedagogy” in line with post-sustainable thinking. This involves agency and the role of nature itself as a co-educator, and promotes cultural changes, and explorative processes of finding “the wild” – the unknown, and complexity in nature – and thus of challenging the human need for control. This approach is also, in line with the 2030 Agenda, an attempt to move from advocating predetermined behavioural change to embracing a pluralistic perspective on sustainability, based on holistic views on education. Such views include curiosity, wonderment, compassion and agency as guiding lights. 

The book is structured into three sections, based on three interrelated strands. These strands are, in various ways, dependent on one another and further engaged with bringing education theory and practice together. These strands are 1) Belonging and sensing, 2) Critical thinking, social justice and action competence, and 3) Creating hope in a vanishing world. These strands aim to increase our access to and understanding of the ways in which sustainability can be integrated into education and why. The purpose of the text is to encourage educators of all kinds and levels, as well as scholars in different fields, to explore new perspectives on education for sustainable development. The book examines probes in diverse academic fields and focuses on how to combine different approaches andcontent, and therefore everyone interested in interdisciplinary and cross-curricular teaching and learning should find this work enlightening.

Margaretha Häggström holds a PhD in Educational Practice at the University of Gothenburg, and is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education, with an orientation towards multimodal and aesthetic perspectives. The Swedish Research Council has founded her research.  She has a background as a high school teacher, teaching visual art and Swedish. She is involved in the Teacher Education Programs at the University since 2011, and currently involved in an ERASMUS-project: Education for resilience and sustainability. Her special field concern aesthetics as didactical tools, participation and communication, and inclusive pedagogical methods, as well as multimodality in higher education. Her research interests concern education and sustainability, relational pedagogy and transformative learning. She has recently edited the book Storyline: A Way to Understand Multimodality in a Learning Context and Teacher Education, together with a colleague at Østfold University,Norway College. She is currently editing a textbook about education and sustainability in Swedish.

Catarina Schmidt holds a PhD in Pedagogy at Jönköping University and the University of Gothenburg, and is a senior lecturer at the School of Education and Communication and the Faculty of Education, with an orientation towards literacy education. She started her carrier as a primary school teacher in 1988, and later completed a Master’s degree in Subject Didactics. Since 2009 she has been committed to research considering conditions and possibilities for children’s and young people’s meaning making and communication in relation to multilingualism, literature, and citizenship. Schmidt has a special interest in knowledge regarding critical literacy and linguistic scaffolds across the curriculum. She has published several papers on these topics in both Swedish and international scientific journals. In collaboration with colleagues from Sweden and the USA she has recently co-authored the chapter, The Situational in Critical Literacy, soon to be published within The Handbook of Critical Literacy on Routledge.