Education for Sustainable Development and social justice: Global and local challenges and educational openings

While connections between social justice and environmental sustainability have for long been obvious in parts of the world where environmental problems have affected people in highly unequal ways, only recently have these connections become (partly) recognized in educational policy, practices and research. In this presentation, I explore an discuss how social justice concerns emerge in environmental and sustainability education practices in specific empirical contexts and situations, how educational practice could address social justice in relation to environment and sustainability, and how educational research may contribute to this.

My starting points are empirical examples from ethnographic research in two rather different contexts; on the one hand, the study of environmental knowledge forms in a community in Northern Kenya, in particular paying attention to young people’s navigations of environmental knowledge, and, on the other hand, the study of social inequality and inclusion in nature pedagogical activities in Denmark. First, I discuss how hierarchies of knowledge forms are created and strengthened in curricula and educational practices, resulting in the marginalization of non-dominating forms of knowledge about and ways of relating to nature. Second, I consider how these processes relate to global knowledge hierarchies as well as to locally situated forms of social inequality, linked to e.g. class and ethnic minority positions, which are reproduced within school systems. Last, I argue that overcoming the reproduction of social inequality and dominating knowledge hierarchies in environmental and sustainability education demands a stronger attention to engaged scholarship and collaborative research.