DesigninganESD

First field of action: Learning from societal issues

As described above, societal issues provide an interesting context for developing the disposition to make choices in society as resilient persons, and to do so in an active, conscious way and together with others. At the same time, pupils are given the opportunity to renew the world from the safe place for practice that school can provide (Van Poeck & Östman 2020) and to experience that they themselves can be shapers of society.

Which societal issues you bring into the classroom depends on the pupils. Their level of development, interests and emotions, as well as factors such as current events, strongly determine the issues that can be addressed.

However, this is not an easy task, especially with young children. After all, carefully chosen local and concrete societal issues can turn into more complex and worrying societal issues, in which terror, the extinction of ecosystems or even death come into the picture. A teacher who does not want to inhibit the curiosity of pre-schoolers and who does not want to simply dismiss the children’s questions wonders at that moment how hard these societal problems hit pre-schoolers, how parents will react and how far you as a teacher have to go to ‘neutralise’ high-impact, societal issues.

As explained above, in an ESD experimental environment, attention is paid to a number of principles with the aim of creating a safe place for practice for the making of conscious choices in society. Ideally, children and young people grow up in an environment in which they can practice safely at home and in their free time. Djapo focuses on setting up such a place for practice at school. The defined factors that determine a quality ESD experimental environment have therefore been developed from an educational perspective, which does not alter the fact that they also deserve attention in other contexts.

The various fields of action form a systemic whole. This means that if you take action in one of the fields, there will automatically be movement in the others.

In situations like this, it is advisable for a teacher to slow down and enter into dialogue with colleagues, in order to find answers together. Together, they can find ways of continuing to use the children’s questions as their departure point (Palmer 2016). While this theoretical framework focuses on creating opportunities to develop pupils’ ESD dispositions, we must not forget that teachers must also attend to the development and exemplification of their own dispositions. In order to deal with serious societal issues that children face, the teachers’ team needs to put heads together. The social dispositions of teachers, in which the exchange of perspectives plays an important role, are very much at the forefront here and are an opportunity for the development of these skills in practice, both for ourselves, as teachers, and in teacher teams.

Second field of action: Learning by doing

As human beings, we usually only start to think consciously when we are confronted with situations in which existing knowledge, skills or values are no longer useful or sufficient, or seem to have failed. Such situations make us reflect and trigger our creativity to renew the world (Van Poeck & Östman 2020). By ‘learning by doing’ we mean that the learners start thinking about an issue because they feel that the knowledge and skills they have acquired so far via the teacher are not sufficient to generate answers.

Societal issues present us with such problematic situations. The feeling that we do not have the right knowledge or skills to provide an answer demands that we make a move, by thinking or acting, or both at the same time. An ESD experimental environment in which this happens offers opportunities for learning by doing: we learn by going through thinking processes, then through actual action, and finally by reflecting on both. This alternate thinking/doing and reflecting should lead to achievement of our objectives - via new knowledge, skills or insights, an opinion, different possibilities, an analysis, or something else. It is a process in which pupils enter into relationships with the world around them. We learn by relating to what comes our way in the social, physical or emotional world, because in the process we give meaning to it (Taguchi 2007) (Östman, Van Poeck & Öhman 2019). These relationships are not only cognitive – as our feelings also determine the meaning we give to things. These feelings amount to important added value (Håkansson, Van Poeck & Östman 2019) that derives from this way of shaping a powerful learning environment, because they make us feel involved in the world around us.

‘Learning by doing’ allows pupils to develop by making them think about the world, make choices and reflect on those choices. Because learning occurs in relation to the surrounding world, the learning process is a rich one in which cognition and emotion go hand in hand, and in which knowledge and skills are used to achieve a goal.