Empowering political engagement with unsustainable actions: the possibilities and limitations of teaching guides for climate change education

Abstract

The UNESCO-led Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) underscores the need to increase teachers’ capacities to promote sustainable actions through ESD, and several capacity-building teaching guides have been developed with that purpose. From the perspectives of the pluralistic and transformative traditions of education, these guides should support teachers’ capacity to facilitate democratic education processes through which students are empowered to engage with different ways to problematize unsustainable actions. However, social practice theory scholars’ critique of behavior-oriented theories – which is largely neglected in ESD research – provides reasons to suspect that the latter theories’ problematization of unsustainable actions dominates the guides. This would significantly limit their empowering potential. This study draws on the ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach, to explore how ESD guides for secondary climate change education problematize unsustainable actions and examine the possibilities and limitations these problematizations constitute for empowering political engagement.