ESD in classrooms

Abstract

Abstract (600 words)

In the context of the Anthropocene, schools have an important role to play in fostering societal creativity in order to develop a set of sustainable solutions. Transformative social change implies a refounding of educational policies by targeting the institution (Curnier, 2021; Sterling, 2011). Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), whose aims are in line with this, have gradually appeared in curricula since the 2000s. In 2021, the canton of Vaud has nevertheless chosen to disengage from a consensual ESD to emphasise Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in a transformative and strong sustainability perspective. It is therefore necessary to offer involved teachers the means to implement such an education in the form of a teaching arrangement.

Before creating a teaching arrangement on a defined topic (here rivers planning in geography) in an ESE perspective, it is appropriate to collect social representations of pupils. Indeed, social representation, a field developed by the psychosociologist Moscovici (1961), is defined as “a process of internalization of an object by a person or a group to become an object of thought whose content is substituted for reality” (Barthes & Alpe, 2016, p. 57). Until 2010, studies on social representations in education had didactic scopes. Then, with the emergence of “educations for”, relationships to knowledge, questions of objectification and legitimacy of taught knowledge became the main fields of study (Barthes & Alpe, 2016). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the French-speaking Swiss pupils’ representations of sustainability and rivers planning. In October 2021, 219 pupils completed an online survey designed to assess their representations of sustainability. The preliminary results reveal groups of pupils characterised by their attitude, knowledge and visions of the future in a sustainability perspective. These findings will be useful for designing a teaching unit, which will be the subject of a forthcoming study.