Trial lecture - time and place
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
Title: The concepts of affect and emotions from a multidisciplinary perspective: Definitions and implications for education for a sustainable future
Public Defence
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 12:00 -
Adjudication committee
- 1st opponent: Professor Maria Ojala, University of Oulu, Finland
- 2nd opponent: Professor Laure Kloetzer, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- Chair of committee: Professor Hans Christian Arnseth, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor Emerita Doris Jorde, Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Doctor Alfredo Jornet Gil, University of Girona, Spain
- Professor Erik Knain, Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo
Summary
This doctoral thesis reports findings from efforts to build collective agency and hope toward a dialectical and fair transformation in open schooling sustainability education. This thesis is a result of my participation in a European coordination and action research project called Science Education for Action and Engagement towards Sustainability (SEAS) and explores how open schooling can engage communities in co-designing lesson plans for transformation toward sustainability.
Hope is conceptualized in this thesis as experimenting with actions that resonate with co-created positive narratives of change. To theorize what resonation in hope might mean, I draw inspiration from future oriented science education, critical pedagogy, critical psychology, the three spheres of transformation model, and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). In the articles included in this thesis, we take up the CHAT notion of systemic contradictions as something that transverses both societal and individual dimensions and investigate how students position themselves and are positioned in the overall object of activity, which in the thesis is fostering hope, collective agency, and the development of positive narratives of change in sustainability education. We specify this overall object of activity by investigating the development of a more complex object of activity in sustainability transformations in the context of upper-secondary sustainability education.
This thesis consists of an extended abstract and three studies, each reported in separate articles. In Article I, we explore affective contradictions manifesting in students’ narratives of change articulated in dialogues with researchers after the students had participated in a lesson plan co-designed in the open schooling community. In Article II, we study narratives of change written by young people in four different European countries and gathered with a digital tool, SenseMaker. In Article III, we investigate contradictions emerging in co-creating a lesson plan for sustainability education in the open schooling community.
The findings of our studies indicate that the object of activity in sustainability education can be expanded by positioning out-of-school actors in a new division of labor and experimenting with new narratives of change and digital tools. In the new narratives of change, narrative means can connect and create coherence between fragmented discourses and practices by integrating the subjective, practical, and political processes in transformations and bridging gaps between the curriculum and students’ authentic questions. Our studies indicate that co-creating and positioning students and other actors as historical actors toward systemic change requires building new supportive political and educational structures that help specify the students’ change narratives.
When articulating a collective agency in the sustainability crisis, the students not only draw from the activity they recently participated in in the open schooling community but also ideological narratives. In their narratives, the students refer to a “we” with hope and agency and a “we” that is egoistic and does not care about the crisis. In configurations of hope, collective and individual actions are described as meaningful and entail trust toward the power of knowledge, caring, and technological developments. Configurations of hopelessness are facilitated by a lack of confidence in the collective and powerful actors’ capability to act in the crisis. When discussing the configurations of hopelessness, the students often struggle to articulate their care toward their jeopardized future. In general, the students have difficulties positioning themselves as historical actors in the sustainability crisis in ways that they consider meaningful.
Our findings indicate that the collective we, which is embedded in the narratives of change, forms through shared experiences that cumulate in the collaboration between the school and out-of-school actors. Occasionally, when the students clearly articulate their and the generalized young people’s motives to care about the state of the environmental and climate crisis, an affective resistance against the narrative of egoism seems to emerge.