ESD through the lens of political didactics

Education for sustainable development (ESD) seeks to empower people to think and act in a sustainable way (BMBF, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, 2020). With this comprehensive educational goal, it addresses all areas of life that offer learning opportunities. Associated goals such as ecological responsibility or social justice are highly compatible with the guiding principles of political education. Nevertheless, education for sustainable development contains a strong normative component that has a contradictory effect: Education for sustainable development is not only an educational framework, but also a clearly defined political strategy.

Based on this complex relationship, the research project explores the questions of how education for sustainable development is positioned in the current political didactic discourse and what added value may lie in a stronger integration of political didactic considerations with the concepts of education for sustainable development. A research model using the Delphi method will be used in the empirical analysis. This method is particularly well suited to opening up fields of research and creating forecasts (Cuhls 2019). 

The Delphi process will be divided into three survey stages: The first stage involves gathering as broad a range of expertise on the subject area as possible. This is achieved by means of a standardized online survey addressed to individuals working in the field of political didactics. On the basis of this online survey’s findings, individuals from the field will be interviewed during the second stage. These interviews will be evaluated using qualitative content analysis. Both the findings of the first and second stages will then form the baseline for expert workshops as part of the third stage of the Delphi study. In the workshops, conceptual and practice-oriented building blocks for political education for sustainable development will be drawn up. Decision-making mechanisms as well as inclusions and exclusions of the various empirical and theoretical findings will be observed. The inclusion of existing political didactic expertise in all phases of the project will be one of the project’s characteristic features.

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BMBF [Federal Ministry of Education and Research] (2020) Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung, at: https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/de/bildung/bildung-fuer-nachhaltige-entwicklung/bildung-fuer-nachhaltige-entwicklung_node.html (accessed June 14, 2023)

Cuhls K. (2019). Die Delphi-Methode – eine Einführung. In M. Niederberger & O. Renn (Eds.) Delphi-Verfahren in den Sozial- und Gesundheitswissenschaften (pp. 3-31). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-21657-3_1