in conversations during workshops organized by non-governmental organizations;
– the second level, which is mesoscopic, includes the learning that takes place when activists, in elaborating their strategies to combat an issue, consider their experiences in a broader context that integrates the experiences of other activists;
– the third level, which is macroscopic, corresponds to the political learning that takes place when activists interact with their allies or opponents (police, government institutions, businesses, etc.) in forming their petitions.
In non-formal education, Eco-Schools are one of the pioneering schemes (founded in 1994 in Denmark) that have been implemented around EDIs. In several countries6 around the world, this initiative has been developed in primary, middle and high schools (eco-schools) and universities (eco-campuses). It consists of learning support on six priority topics (food, biodiversity, waste, water, energy, social support) for the concrete implementation of sustainable development in educational institutions in partnership with the local community and the students’ parents.
Non-formal education around EDIs is also affected by international educational policies. Historically, the latter shows two successive cycles of “educational institutionalization” taking the form of two recommended mechanisms that have succeeded one another over time: the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals.
In formal education, EDIs are covered by disciplinary curricula. In France, three school and/or academic disciplines deal with these questions: life and earth sciences, which take on the environmental dimension; economics, which takes on the economic dimension; and geography, which takes on the social dimension (Simonneaux 2011). Vergnolle Mainar (2008, 2009) notes that geography and life and earth sciences are the two disciplines that overlap the most with the environmental approach. This author also identifies areas of interdisciplinarity in the school disciplines concerned with the environment, which she differentiates into two groups: disciplines which have a significant overlap with environmental topics (life sciences, earth sciences and geography) and disciplines which are fairly unrelated to environmental topics (physics, chemistry, mathematics, technology, physical education and sport, history, civic education, economic and social sciences, French, philosophy, artistic disciplines and languages). The Tunisian context presents almost the same characteristics when it comes to school disciplines involving environmental issues.
The two international educational policy cycles mentioned above, as well as the disciplinary curricula, constitute inflections allowing the passage from informal education in ecological mobilizations to non-formal education or to formal education. Moreover, aspects in this educational trilogy can be hybridized as the line between formal, non-formal and informal becomes increasingly blurred (Barthes and Alpe 2018).
Several research programs on the links between the political and content involving EDIs in formal and non-formal education are being implemented around the world. Research in the Americas has focused on the interactions of formal and non-formal environmental education (e.g. for adults) with the dominant neoliberal political and economic context (Hursh et al. 2015; Stahelin et al. 2015). They open up a discussion of pedagogical practices and content that teachers can use to help learners develop forms of environmental citizenship that actively challenge the neoliberal privatization of environmental responsibility (Dimick 2015).
Other programs follow the French tradition of didactic research: that of the didactics of socially acute questions (SAQs) and that of the didactics of the curriculum of education for sustainable development (ESD). In these two programs, the political is presented according to a double register: strategic and tactical (Lange 2011). Indeed, the work of Lange (2011, 2013, 2015) on the didactics of the ESD curriculum puts forward the political as a strategic purpose of this education on the one hand and as an organizing (tactical) principle of educational situations on the other. This research has enabled proposing an analytical model of the functioning of an educational situation for sustainable development as a social academic practice of democracy. Furthermore, the work of Simonneaux (2013b) and his team (Simonneaux 2011; Bérard et al. 2016) presents the political according to the strategic register of education geared towards scientific citizenship and according to a tactical register as organizers of situations of debate and deliberation on problematic environmental issues. Such scientific citizenship can be the aim of non-formal education for the political (action research aimed at popular education in politics).
Another program borrows from the Nordic tradition (Håkansson et al. 2017) whereby the political dimension of EDIs is identified in four aspects of the political as:
– generating inclusion and consensus;
– containing cognitive and emotional elements;
– involving power;
– representing a decision-making process.
The researchers involved in that program aim to transpose the idea of the political dimension practice of teaching and research to educational situations involving EDIs. Indeed, the work of Håkansson et al. (2017) proposes a categorization of these situations according to the political trend running through them. This trend may take the form of “democratic participation”, “political reflection”, “political deliberation” or a “political moment”. More recently, these researchers (Håkansson and Östman 2018) have proposed an analytical model integrating four phases of the “political moment” in these educational situations. The work of Van Poeck and Vandenabeele (2012) and Van Poeck et al. (2014) underline the importance of analyzing the democratic character of educational practices in terms of enriching the discussion on the democratic paradox in environmental education and sustainable development. Subsequently, these researchers set out to develop a method for analyzing “political movement” to study how teachers’ actions facilitate or hinder the opening of space for the political in educational situations (Van Poeck and Östman 2017). The work of Sund and Öhman (2014) and Sund (2016) proposes a reconsideration of the political in environmental education and sustainable development according to several guidelines (unmasking the political dimension, repoliticizing education, seeing beyond the relativistic and objectivistic divide and using emotion as a driving force).
Curricula are objects of formal schooling that privileges the universalization of its contents and strives to prohibit the unexpected and heterogeneous (Ardoino and Berger 2010). Non-formal education systems are also formalizations of the informal with normative drifts (Barthes 2017). Taking these two facts into account leads to the problem of the “fate” of the political in the EDIs when it comes to its inflections in non-formal and formal education.
This book aims to build a model in order to structure the political in educational content involving EDIs. The components of this model serve as didactic guidelines for the elaboration of the content of a possible curriculum for a political education through these questions. The book consists of six chapters.
Chapter 1, which follows the introduction, suggests that EDIs should be categorized into metathemes: environmental policies and environmental change, environmental ethics, sustainable development, agri-food issues, environmental technology and environmental management and, finally, the issue of transitions. This chapter also proposes a differentiation of the constitutive themes of these metathemes according to their anti-political or political trend. This thematic categorization refers to a historical analysis of human political thought.
Chapter 2 focuses on the development of a conceptual and analytical framework for the political potential of EDIs. This analysis identifies this potential in four components:
