Societalissues

Making conscious choices about societal issues requires opportunity to practice - to get started, to achieve success, to make mistakes and to learn from them. The school can offer pupils this opportunity from the moment they enter as a pre-schooler, until the time they leave. ESD therefore explicitly presents societal issues as a relevant, authentic and transdisciplinary learning context for pupils, within which they can optimally develop themselves.

Environment

The word environment refers to the place(s) where pupils learn in the context of formal education. After all, learning takes place not only in the classroom, but throughout the school and in the midst of society. The term ESD experimental environment thus refers not only to the classroom, but to any learning environment within the context of formal education.

Societal issue vs challenge

Djapo makes a distinction between, on the one hand, major societal issues such as hunger, inequality and climate change, and on the other, specific challenges formulated by the pupils, towards which they can work in an action-oriented way.

Societal issues are broad, societal problems in regard to which carefully formulated end goals are lacking and paths to solutions uncertain (Runco 1994). They are authentic and relevant starting points for (learning from) action-oriented thinking. There is a need to formulate ‘challenges’ in order to give the process an action-oriented form, precisely because the issues are so broad and their formulation so unclear.

This process from societal issue to challenge to conscious choice can be a very instructive route for the development of pupils’ ESD dispositions. Nevertheless, ESD should not be equated with project education. ESD is education that provides opportunities to develop pupils’ disposition to make conscious choices in society. It therefore also provides opportunities to develop ESD dispositions.