By David Kronlid

The Swedish T-learning case study focuses on eco-schools (Green Flag in Swedish) in Sweden. The case study has three aims. The first aim is to study how Green Flag approaches climate change in their educational activities. We are interested in both climate change as educational and/or learning content, the perspective of pedagogical methods, teaching and learning material and policies on different levels. The second aim is to study whether and if so which and how, Green Flag is engaged in transgressive learning in dealing with climate change. The third aim is to study how climate change education has been scaled by Green Flag as educational content, pedagogy and process.

This means that the analysis of transgressive climate change education is guided by an analytic typology based on a scaling conceptual framework developed by an international scaling ESD research team with scholars form the Swedish International Centre of Education for Sustainable Development (SWEDESD), the Rhodes University Environmental Learning Research Centre, and the Southern African Development Community Regional Environmental Education Programme. The typology focuses on multi- and cross-scale scaling of educational activities as an expansive learning process. The key concepts in the analytic typology are scaling object, scaling subjects, scaling sites and pathways, scaling dimension, resources and drivers. A further focus of the case analysis will be the identification of generative moments in the history of Green Flag and transgressive climate change education. The case study will focus on how and why questions regarding the focus presented above.

The Green Flag programme seeks to influence people’s attitudes and behavior in order to encourage sustainable development. In order to boost action and intergenerational confidence in order to address major sustainable development challenges, Keep Sweden Tidy (an NGO) implementing the Green Flag programme, offers the Green Flag tool and certification to energize active and long-term sustainable development work in schools and preschools. The tool has a solution-oriented focus where children and young people are involved in a positive change. Green Flag is free and KST offers support to the schools who takes on Green Flag. At present, over 2,600 schools and kindergartens are affiliated to Green Flag in Sweden. As member of the international community of eco-schools, Green Flag is a member of eco-schools initiatives in nearly 60 countries worldwide with millions of educators, children and adolescents participating in the programme.

Parallel to the case study, SWEDESD is conducting a study in philosophy of education with the aim of inquiring into the meaning and function of ‘transgressive learning’. The findings in this study will serve as theoretical basis for the empirical case study of the scaling of Green Flag transgressive climate change education. Results from the philosophical study, which is organised around an international research seminar in transgressive learning, will also be fed into the other case studies in the network, and, as a consequence, take into consideration empirical results about transgressive learning produced in the other case studies.

A preliminary nexus that is being worked on by the Green Flag is that of interaction of climate change, marine environment, natural resources and pesticides/chemicals.

September 2016

SWEDESD