Solidaritet och utbildning för hållbar utveckling: En studie av förväntningar på och förutsättningar för miljömoraliskt lärande i den svenska gymnasieskolan

Abstract in English

The comprehensive ambition of the present thesis was to acquire knowledge about expectations on and preconditions for environmental moral learning within the education for sustainable development (ESD) in the Swedish upper secondary school. The expectations on ESD were explored by examining the description of “sustainable development” in the curriculum, and the prerequisites were examined by analysing environmental attitudes, commitments, and actions of 18-year-old students. The thesis focuses in particular on attitudes to solidarity as a value that unites the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of sustainable development. The theoretical foundation is based on curriculum theory and learning theory, incorporating influences from pragmatic philosophy, while theories of environmental psychology were applied to explain commonalities in attitudes to altruistic and biospheric values. The thesis comprises four studies, and mixed methods were employed as methodological approach. The first study involved a discourse analysis, and aimed at clarifying the description of sustainable development in the curriculum, and to reveal what subject position(s) the discourse implies. The second study was a questionnaire, where statistical methods were used to analyse attitudes to solidarity, equality, and respect for nature. The third study was also a questionnaire, focusing more specifically on attitudes to different aspects of solidarity. The fourth study was an interview study, utilizing a thematic analysis in order to elucidate how students think about solidarity and the future, and how they have encountered the concepts of solidarity and future in teaching. The results disclosed that the expectations on ESD is characterized by an ecological modernization discourse, in which two subject positions are articulated, one scientific and one technical, the latter with expectations on students to be ethical agents. The quantitative studies in the present thesis corroborated previously found correlations between attitudes to altruistic and attitudes to biospheric values. The significant correlation between future orientation and solidarity unveiled by the present thesis constitutes however a pioneering result. The interview analyses imparted that students have experienced little moral reasoning in school with regard to sustainable development, and furthermore conveyed that the future dimension had basically been missing in the teaching they had encountered. The present thesis furthermore contributes methodologically and theoretically by the development of a new scale for appraising solidarity.