There have been many research contributions on the topic of student performance in education for sustainable development (ESD), as well as numerous studies on students’ ‘sustainability consciousness’. However, despite a growing emphasis on ESD, few studies have focused on student diversity as a critical perspective on ESD in science classrooms. In our view, teaching approaches can be biased by the us/them dichotomy and by the lack of space for plurality. This regard plurality of cultural and socio-economic statuses in society on a local level, like within communities or at single schools in Norwegian contexts, and globally, concerning North and South issues. Here, cultural diversity refers to a diversity of students, as well as to a plurality of thoughts and voices.

In this article, our central aim is to explore how a plurality of voices can contribute to a more dynamic and open learning environment in ESD. We present a conversation on the topic of sustainable development (SD) between Shara and Mia, two girls in their first year of upper secondary school. This urban classroom, and the conversation between these two girls, were chosen to represent tensions that challenges dominating ESD discourses. Our concern is that ESD should not marginalise groups in society with another cultural and socio-economic capital than the majority. In this article, we use the term urban classroom. There is not a unified definition or meaning of the term urban. Scholars have outlined urban students, urban environments, and urban education in different ways. We draw on Lisa M. Marco-Bujosa, Katherine L. McNeill and Audrey Friedman (2020, p. 5), stating that the term often indicates geographic area with factors of a racially, ethnically and culturally diverse student body, high concentrations of poverty and low levels of student achievement.

The conversation took place in a science class. We present how they drew on their family backgrounds and life experiences, representing their different funds of knowledge, in a discussion on the United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDGs). Funds of knowledge shape ways of knowing, reading, writing and talking.

Elisabeth Birr Moje, Kathryn Mcintosh Ciechanowski, Katherine Kramer, Lindsay Ellis, Rosario Carrillo and Tehani Collazo (2004) wrote about literacy learning in content areas in secondary school. Their research interest was the construction of classroom spaces that integrate school literacy practices with funds of knowledge and discourse upon which youth can draw on from out of school settings. They suggested the integration of diverse, everyday funds of knowledge and discourse with literacy practices in science classrooms. James Paul Gee (2015) used the terms discourse with a lowercase “d” to characterise everyday language in the broad sense, and a larger network of meaning as Discourse with a capital “D.” In our study, the dominating ESD discourse refers to ways of conveying values and attitudes. This regard for instance choices of terms and words in speech and writing, and not least distinctive ways of acting (Gee, 2015, p. 155).

The conversation between these two girls has its origins in a nine-month ethnographic classroom study in an urban science classroom. The task, which was given by the teacher, was a non-graded assignment in which Shara and Mia had the opportunity to contribute their own experiences and present examples from their own lives. We want to show the space that was given to the girls in this task, where the girls’ cultural and social funds of knowledge were activated.

In 2006, the same year Shara and Mia entered primary school, Norwegian school authorities presented a document (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2006) that highlighted Norwegian efforts regarding the development of ESD. The aim was to clarify the national educational goals and priorities, as well as to outline actions necessary to comply with the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014 (UNESCO 2005). In 2015, one year before Shara and Mia entered upper secondary school, the UN adopted Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations 2015), which contained 17 goals. These goals appear in textbooks, teaching materials and learning resources in Norwegian schools. Norway has committed to enact ESD at all levels of the educational system. SD has remained a central aim in education since the concept of SD was first endorsed at the UN General Assembly in 1987 (WCED 1987).

Educational policy documents state that education should contribute to students’ increased awareness of individual responsibility for engaged and deliberate action for SD (Kunnskapsdepartementet 2016, p. 22). The national curriculum, textbooks and teaching materials draw, by and large, upon the UN’s definition of SD. The term sustainable development seems to dominate Norwegian discourse and classrooms. The emphasis on development is recurrent. Hence, in this article we use the terms sustainable development (SD) and education for sustainable development (ESD) as we study a classroom that is part of this Norwegian educational discourse.

In the conversation between Shara and Mia, they discussed six of the SDGs, and they positioned themselves according to how they perceived these goals, related to their required school knowledge as well as their lived experiences as adolescents living in the Norwegian welfare state with immigrant family backgrounds. Mia and Shara belong to the approximately 17% of the population in Norway with an immigrant background. They both were born and raised in Norway. They attend an urban school in a part of town with a concentration of immigrants and low-income families.

Social and cultural aspects of an urban Norwegian classroom

Immigration to Norway was relatively low until the 1970s. Since then, it has risen through several phases: labour immigration in the early 1970s, family immigrants and asylum seekers in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently, migrant workers from the new EU countries in Eastern Europe, who have dominated immigration to Norway since the expansion of the European.

In Shara and Mia’s class, students from all these immigrant groups were present. The Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway) have long-standing traditions for thoroughly developed welfare systems and are classified as social democratic welfare states. Poverty in Norway is a relative term and points to the lack of resources for certain individuals and the subsequent lack of opportunities afforded, compared to an ‘average person’ in that society. The number of children who grow up in families with persistently low incomes in Norway has increased. Nearly four in 10 children with immigrant backgrounds, or 38.7%, belonged to a household with persistent low income in 2018.

In a study, Carla Chinga-Ramirez (2017) scrutinised the mechanisms that lead to some minority pupils’ self-definition as ‘foreigners’ and how it impacts their inability to also consider themselves diligent and talented pupils in the Norwegian school. In this context, she referred to the Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad. In her studies, Gullestad found a form of egalitarianism in the Nordic countries and in Norway wherein equality is cast as ‘sameness’ (Likhet). Likhet indicates that social actors must consider themselves as more or less the same in order to feel of equal value (Gullestad 2006). Chinga-Ramirez argued that equality as ‘sameness’ forms a specific concept of a ‘normal student’. She correspondingly referred to studies showing how Norwegian schools are shaped by a Western, individualistic, middle-class mindset. This framing is perceived as being pedagogically neutral (Chinga-Ramirez 2017). Observations of Mia and Shara’s science classroom, their science textbook and other teaching materials indicate sameness and pedagogical neutrality as dominant. Structural, cultural and social aspects of ESD are not problematised.

Sameness also seems to be a characteristic of the Norwegian Discourse on ESD to the best of our knowledge. Observations in Mia and Shara’ science classroom, their science textbook and other teaching material indicate sameness as premises. Structural, cultural, and socio-economic aspects of ESD are hardly problematised. For instance, on the website of the Sustainable backpack program, a national program initiated by the Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Climate and Environment, an overview is given of school projects receiving support. A short description of the projects from the 2014/15 school year until 2020 is presented on the website. A common signifier for the project descriptions is the emphasis placed on shaping the students, and how they ought to act in order to make environmentally friendly and sustainable choices, regardless of student diversity or background. (Natursekken.no 2020).

Malin Ideland and Claes Malmberg (20142015) studied Swedish teaching materials that explicitly addressed issues concerning SD. They noted that perceptions and ideas about children and childhood in teaching materials affect views about what children are and can be. In their analysis, Ideland and Malmberg (20142015), also referring to Homi Bhabha (1994), found that the representation of people in this teaching material could mainly be divided into two groups: us and them. They pointed out that it is particularly important to question representations of different parts of the world and especially to be aware of representations used to describe groups of people in ESD teaching materials. ESD discourses often emphasise the ideas of Our Common Future (WCED 1987) as a globally inclusive project, one which is inherently good and should ideally include everyone. On the contrary, however, the representations that Ideland and Malmberg uncovered revealed tensions that could lead to exclusion mechanisms. Furthermore, they argued that school reforms with the purpose of including all students in the same vision can also lead to exclusion by defining certain ways of life as problematic. In our view, issues of diversity are often not addressed properly, neither in ESD teaching material and teaching approaches nor in the educational policy documents on ESD in Norway. Iann Lundegård and Per-Olof Wickman (2009) emphasised an ongoing process and plurality as central elements of an ESD discourse (Gee 2015). Their perspective is relevant for our study.

Our research question is: How did these girls draw on different funds of knowledge in a discourse of the UN's Sustainability Development Goals?

Our research question developed from the increasing concern that ESD, as portrayed in educational policy documents and other visionary literature, could contribute to tensions between the inclusion and exclusion of groups or individuals, here termed the (re-)production of othering (Bhabha 1994). The concept of othering is understood as a process of differentiating between us and them. Contrasting we/us and other/them means selecting a criterion that allows for humanity to be alienated into two groups: one which represents the norm, whose identity is treasured, and the other defined by burdens, devalued and subject to discrimination.

In the following, first, we frame our analysis of the conversation by presenting literature on SD and ESD as well as tensions and ambiguities in ESD research due to a lack of critical structural perspectives.

Three broad views on sustainable development (SD)

Due to the close relationship between SD and ESD, where SD seems to be the ultimate goal and ESD is the key to achieving this goal, we start with a brief review of approaches to SD issues. Despite SD being widely discussed in educational discourses, its definitions are many and varied, in part because the concept is constantly evolving, making it, by nature, hard to define. One of the original definitions of SD can be attributed to the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), which argued that SD is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition is presented in Mia and Shara’s science textbook (Brandt, Hushovd and Tellefsen 2013). An image of three overlapping circles is presented, signifying concerns related to the economy, society and environment. This model of SD is meant to indicate the intersection of the three areas of concern. Joe Hurley (2009) showed that in SD, a challenge arises in defining what to sustain and what to develop—and more critically, how conflicts between the desire to sustain and the desire to develop are resolved. Several scholars have struggled to analyse this field of debate (Hurley 2009). Bill Hopwood, Mary Mellor and Geoff O’Brien (2005) mapped three approaches for describing the degree of environmental concern versus the degree of socio-economic concern (Hurley 2009).

Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien (2005) drew our attention to the importance of a fair distribution of resources. According to Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien, both contemporary and future social justice constitute a crucial component of the concept of SD. In this article, we follow Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien (2005), who classified the range of views within the SD debate according to three wide interpretations: status quo, reformative and transformative. These interpretations differ regarding what kinds of changes are considered necessary in societies to realise SD (Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien 2005). Supporters of the status quo approach maintain that SD can be achieved within present social and economic structures. Development is, in this sense, linked to economic growth. Those who take a reformative approach hold a middle level of concern for equality and the environment compared to the other approaches. They contend that SD requires a major reform of present social and economic structures. Nevertheless, the root of the problem is not traced to the nature of the present society but rather to a greater need for knowledge and information. Among the examples that Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien included are ‘green economists’ and the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987). Those who argue for a transformative approach hold high levels of concern for both equality and the environment. Supporters of this approach perceive that increasing environmental and societal problems are being caused by the social and economic structures of the current society and the ways in which humans relate to and interrelate with the environment.

Education for sustainable development

As for SD, there are several definitions of ESD. These definitions seem to suffer from conceptual ambiguity. One of the factors that appears to increase this ambiguity is the relation of ESD to other, similar concepts. There have been many discussions regarding similarities and differences between ESD and environmental education. The expanding body of research literature appears to address different aspects of ESD. A good overview was presented by Fionnuala Waldron, Brian Ruane, Rowan Oberman and Sonia Morris(2019) noted, referring to Michael Bonnett (1999), that ESD has an ability ‘to harmonise two ideas which are potentially in conflict’ (p. 896). In their study on climate change education, they accentuated a critical, open-ended, holistic approach as core elements. The term ESD was developed primarily under the auspices of the UN with the support of UNESCO (Waldron, Ruane, Oberman and Morris 2019).

In a review of ESD research, Xavier Bonal and Clara Fontdevila (2017) found that literature that addresses visions of ESD presents various approaches to the topic. These documents include a corpus of ‘grey’ literature that relies mainly on the potential of individuals to enact shifts in their values (Bonal and Fontdevila 2017). In their review, Bonal and Fontdevila (2017) stressed the need to identify the structural determinants required for advancement towards SD. This focus is absent from most ESD proposals. We claim that a tendency to put responsibility on individuals’ behaviour underrepresents structural features of societies. Bonal and Fontdevila (2017) argued that academic literature on the topic of ESD can be assigned to two categories. In the first category, we can find literature espousing an idealistic approach, one convinced of the potential of ESD and supporting a reformative attitude towards SD. The second category contains literature that is critical of ESD approaches.

Correspondingly, Iann Lundegård and Cecilia Caiman (2019) discuss the pedagogical consequences of different perceptions of the concept of SD. They claim that democratic teaching processes should be at the centre of ESD, and they also describe two different political approaches, ecological modernising and civilisation criticism, as possible solutions to the challenges of a common sustainable future.

To the purpose of our study critical literature with an emphasis on an open-ended, holistic approach (Waldron, Ruane, Oberman and Morris 2019) is particularly relevant, highlighting the need to enquire into the structural causes of global challenges. Literature espousing critical approaches problematises an emphasis placed on individual responsibility.

Othering

Othering is a construct developed within post-colonial theory (Bhabha 1994). That said, othering is not simply a construct but also an identifier of the self, or in-group, by direct, unequal opposition to the other, or out-group, diversity assigning relative inferiority and/or radical alienation to the latter. The notion of othering spread from feminist theory and post-colonial studies to other areas of the humanities and social sciences. Originally, it was rooted in Hegel’s understanding of the encounter of the self with some other in his ‘master–slave’ dialectic, as noted by Lajos L. Brons (2015).

According to Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo (2004), cultural spaces that different students inhabit can be brought together in the classroom. Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo (2004) used the theoretical concept of the third space from Bhabha, which emphasises interactions of culture and language. Bhabha highlighted the need to focus on the articulation of cultural differences. According to Bhabha, the subject of expression is not personable ‘but remains a spatial relation’ between I and you, adding that ‘the meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither one nor the other’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 36). However, the goal of constructing a third space is not to teach youth that academic or everyday sources of knowledge are more right or more wrong, but simply to make a space for multiple funds of knowledge and discourse (Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo 2004).

Plurality of voices

As a result of our enquiry into the SD and ESD approaches, we identified a need for educational approaches to ESD that include a variety of voices and have the potential for plurality, representation, and recognition of human diversity in SD discourses.

The contribution of Mikhail Bakhtin (1885–1979) to theories of dialogical learning is crucial. Bakhtin was concerned with the interaction between people, their environment, and the culture. Bakhtin’s key concept was dialogue. To Bakhtin, dialogue has a wider meaning than the everyday term, a view of the term also shared by other theoretical scholars (e.g. Martin Buber, Jürgen Habermas, and Paulo Freire). In Bakhtin’s work, the dialogue exists in the situated language, in each utterance. The words become a common territory in the conversation. It is in the differences, variations, and tensions between the different voices that new ideas are born. He considered dialogue as shared inquiry where an answer gives rise to further questions. According to Bakhtin, the different voices blend into a polyphony (Bakhtin 1986). Bakhtin was particularly interested in the ways that text can express the multiple voices interacting in history.

Bhabha criticised Bakhtin as denying a type of double-voicedness. Bhabha was interested in the process of internal self-subversion of language. Bhabha’s idea of double-voicedness does not require an actual dialogue; it can be carried out in the form of a monologue. This was impossible to Bakhtin (McLaverty-Robinson 2020). However, if we include the double-voicedness of authoritative texts, as noted by Bhabha, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue can guide our search for educational approaches that can combat the (re-)production of otherness. Bakhtin was an inspiration for scholars in many different fields, including Rupert Wegerif (2011). According to Wegerif (2011) meanings in dialogues are always situated within cultural and historical contexts—but at the same time, cultural and historical contexts are always interpreted and given meanings from within dialogues. We used Wegerif’s (2011) notion of dialogic space, which ‘allows us to speak of the opening, closing, widening and deepening of a space (p. 180). Dialogic space covers a given possibility to think together, without restrictions, and without claims or expectations of a conclusive agreement.

Method–material and analysis

Context of the study

The empirical material originates from a nine-month ethnographic classroom study in an upper secondary (first year) urban science classroom in Norway. The school was located in an area with racial, ethnical, and cultural diverse populations, and high concentrations of poverty (Marco-Bujosa, McNeill and Friedman 2020). The overall aim of this study was to explore how the urban science classroom engaged the students cultural and linguistic backgrounds as resources for science subjects. ESD was one among several topics that was part of the science teaching during the nine months of field work.

David Bloome and Faythe Beauchemin (2018) note that classroom ethnography attempts to understand the creation of everyday life in the classroom by exploring the classroom. Further, Bloome and Beauchemin emphasise thick description of the classroom in order to reveal and redefine taken‐for‐granted concepts in classroom education. In this article, we scrutinise an audiotaped conversation (30 min) on the topic of SD between two upper secondary school students, Shara and Mia. Their class was culturally and socio-economically heterogeneous. Out of 18 students, 10 have parents (one or both) who were born in a non-Western country. Shara’s parents immigrated to Norway from an African country as adults, while Mia has a Norwegian mother and a father who immigrated to Norway from an African country as a young adult. The girls have visited their parents’ respective homelands several times.

The first author followed the students in science classes (two lessons per week) for nine months, using a variety of qualitative research approaches, including field notes, audiotaped small-group sessions and students’ written assignment submissions. At the end of the nine-month fieldwork, the first author conducted semi-structured interviews with the students, exploring their views on classroom and school climate. These interviews were carried out during school hours in a small meeting room at the school. The set of recordings from the conversation was first transcribed in Norwegian and then translated into English. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD).

We present a case that includes only two students, and no claim is made about its representativeness regarding all students. Likewise, our findings cannot be generalised outside the classroom; however, that was not our intention. Rather, our goal was to increase awareness of how the plurality and diversity aspects of SD might widen educational approaches to ESD.

The material was analysed using critical thematic analysis. In the next step, the analysis of the dialogue between Shara and Mia, we draw on classroom observations, descriptive field notes and interviews from the ethnographic classroom study.

Prior to the conversation between the girls, the class had worked with the SD task in small cooperative learning groups. Learning groups were described by Robyn M. Gillies (2016) as a learning approach. The teacher had divided the students into groups and distributed three SDGs (randomly) to each group. They were given the task of exploring the SDGs and developing suggestions for actions that Norway as a nation could take, and that Norwegians as individuals could take. After discussions in cooperative learning groups, the students each found a classmate who had different goals, and then presented their group work to each other. Mia and Shara chose each other from these criteria.

Analysis—critical and thematic approach

Our analysis of the dialogue sequence draws on Brandi Lawless and Yea-Wen Chen’s (2018) critical thematic analysis. They developed a method they deemed suitable for use as a methodological tool, in two steps, for coding and interpreting qualitative interviews, everyday communication, talk and text. In Step 1, which involves open coding, they broadened thematic content analysis by employing three criteria from conversation analysis: recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness. The three criteria were developed by William Foster Owen (1984). By repetition, Owen refers to the verbatim reproduction of words. In our analysis, this appears in, for example, the repetition of the phrase ‘a society for our grandchildren’—a phrase that we interpreted as reported speech from the textbook and the science teacher.

By recurrence, Owen referred to meaning that is repeated, not necessarily with the same words. In our analyses, we have noted how preoccupied the girls seemed to be with social justice and assistance to those in need. One of several examples of this is Mia’s utterance: ‘We talked about sustainability being the need for countries to help each other’. By forcefulness, Owen referred to that which is presented with weight. We have noted that Shara and Mia’s trust in the welfare state is a consistent theme in their conversation. They also put weight on that membership in the welfare state entails obligations.

The critical, thematic content analysis (Lawless and Chen 2019) is more limited than a discourse analysis. Our analysis focus on concepts central to our interpretation of the conversation between two girls. One central concept is otherness. Our intention is not to give a complementary overview of power relations or the social economic conditions that frame the community and this classroom. We use the three indicators repetition, recurrence, and forcefulness, from Owen (1984). We focus on the situated communication in chosen sequences from a group work in a classroom situation. Owen’s approach to analysis has common features with discourse analysis as applied by Norman Fairclough (1992) in his critical studies of language.

Lawless and Chen then added Step 2, which involves closed coding aimed at identifying the prominence of ideologies, power relations and status-based hierarchies. Our lens into Step 2 deploys the concept of othering.

Step 1: open coding

The first and second authors conducted separate, repeated readings of the transcribed dialogue to achieve immersion and to obtain a sense of the whole. Further, our coding was kept as close as possible to the actual transcribed conversation between the students. Steered by repetition, recurrence and forcefulness, we discussed what the girls’ conversation revealed and indicated, searching for patterns in the conversation. In addition, we drew on dialogical theories of language.

Step 2: closed coding

Anne Solli, Thomas Hillman and Åsa Mäkitalo (2017) have shown how students discursively manage multivocality. During the open coding, we discovered how Mia and Shara handled multiple perspectives. The division between us and them appeared as recurrent and forceful in the dialogue between Mia and Shara. We analysed the sequence of dialogue with the understanding of othering. The concept of othering links conversations to Discourses with larger social constructs (Gee 2015). We explored how the words us/we and them/they functioned in this conversation. Together, authors performed repeated readings, word by word, guided by our research question.

Findings

Mia and Shara’s class was the school’s pride; these students had the school’s highest grades, since this class programme offered a special educational pathway that was very popular, which was a combination of vocational education and a programme for general studies. To qualify for acceptance into this programme, the students needed a grade point average that far exceeded the general acceptance requirements for the overall school community. The ambitious class programme is reflected in students’ utterances in interviews. The students described an endless ‘stream’ of requirements for assignments from all the teachers.

In an interview, Shara stated that she wanted to become a child welfare officer. She lived with her parents and two sisters. Both of her parents immigrated to Norway as adults. She was a lively and academically achieving girl who cared about doing well in school. In an interview she stated that in the classroom she was part of a boisterous group of girls. Extensive fieldnotes recurrently indicate that this group were often reminded to pay attention to the lesson and lower their voices during group work.

Mia lived with her mother, father and one brother. She also wanted to become a child welfare officer. She was concerned with her father’s African country of birth, which she repeatedly referred to. In the classroom, Mia was highly visible and audible. As the class representative to the student council, she voiced many comments and concerns. She was sceptical of the school canteen’s practice of offering expensive and unhealthy foods. In the sciences classes, she found two topics particularly exciting: lifestyle- and health issues, and sustainable development issues. A particularly forceful feature shared by Mia, Shara and their classmates was that they, in the gaze of others, identified themselves as foreigners (Chinga-Ramirez 2017). In the interviews, they dwelt upon how they experienced their own national identity. It seemed as they often had to think about whether they should present themselves as coming from Norway or their parents’ homeland:

I’m still Norwegian even though I have a different background, even though my dad is African. I’m a foreigner in a way, if you get what I mean …-I don’t know what I can call myself because it’s difficult. (Mia)

Shara and Mia expresses similar thoughts about identity:

I kind of change my mind occasionally, I’m born and raised here, and I have a red [Norwegian] passport and all that, I think that I’m technically Norwegian but […] I have family in Eritrea, my parents are from Eritrea and I speak the language and follow a lot of the culture […]. It’s hard, but when people ask, like, ‘where are you from?’ then I say: I’m from Eritrea, because they know I’m born and raised in Norway, each time I say: I’m from Eritrea, then I think, am I Norwegian? Or am I Eritrean, or what am I, so it varies, but I am unsure, myself. (Shara)

I think it has something to do with friends […] when you’re hanging out with Norwegian friends you’re seen as a foreigner, and when I’m hanging out with foreigners I’m seen as Norwegian […] One gets seen, like honestly, I think it has to do a little with, how to say it, your skin colour. (Mia)

This passage, from interviews with Shara and Mia, seems to be in accordance with Chinga-Ramirez’s (2017) notion of minority pupils’ self-definition as foreigners.

The science teacher’s approach to the science topics, including SD issues, was in accordance with the national science curriculum. The teacher recurrently reminded the students that a particular item of knowledge (declarative knowledge, ‘knowing that’) on a topic might be important. He emphasised the final exam. During the spring semester, the teacher arranged a ‘test exam’. He announced the test exam as a valuable rehearsal. Hence, authority of expertise was a forceful guide for the students to judge what was considered by the teacher as legitimate and valued funds of knowledge. In the test exam, the ‘knowing that’ emphasis was particularly visible,

According to field notes, the science teacher’s approaches shifted between deductive and inductive activities. Group work activities were inductive with potential for dialogical education (Wegerif, 2011). However, the teacher usually started a lesson with a short theoretical introduction, followed by an explanation of the task, hence deduced from the presented theory. In most lessons, the specific science funds of knowledge, ways of knowing, doing, talking, and being dominated. However, the deductive activities alternated with more inductive teaching approaches with emphasis on cooperative learning and writing-to-learn activities.

Two contrary observations indicate that the students in this class only experience a plurality of voices outside the classroom. First, when the students in interviews were requested to name one single factor that they value the most, most of the students mentioned the diversity in the student community, the school corridors, and the schoolyard. One of Mia and Sara´s classmate stated in an interview the diversity like this: “In this school everybody can be themselves, you find all kinds of people here. You don’t need to have the latest expensive clothes. Many of my classmates are also my neighbors” (Naomi, white girl of ethnic Norwegian origin).

Second, the classroom appears to be culturally neutral, and perhaps sameness an ideal norm, but this appearance is deceptive. Extensive fieldnotes show that this science classroom did only partial reflect the students’ cultural and socio-economic diversity.

From our fieldnotes one of several examples of this was when the students worked with competence goals in Diet, Nutrition and Health. They were given a brief introduction regarding what kind of nutrition the body is in need of, and how to ensure a varied diet. The introduction was seemingly culturally neutral and drew strictly on science funds of knowledge. After the introduction the task was to draw on a diet tool from the Norwegian health authorities, and to calculate the nutritional content of a dinner dish you ate this weekend. Our fieldnotes revealed an interesting pattern: Despite an open task, potentially allowing the students to draw on their everyday funds of knowledge, the students did not respond by using everyday experiences. Several students chose to analyse the content of a taco dish. The first author asked the students Did you have tacos this weekend? Only two students confirmed having had taco for dinner. Student Merve replied with a question: Do you think I ought to analyse kebab? Her mate Emely: Tacos, since we are in Norway you know, and then we analyse Norwegian food.

According to fieldnotes the lack of responses to opportunities for drawing on everyday funds of knowledge seems to be common in this classroom. We will now describe more closely the dialogue between Shara and Mia, and what seems to be an exception to the otherwise monocultural classroom conversation. Their conversation reflected cultural and socio-economic experiences that rarely were exposed in the science classroom. We explored how these girls outlined issues of SD by examining how they handled multiple perspectives (Solli, Hillman and Mäkitalo, 2017).

How the dialogic space emerged

The conversation was framed by the girls’ presentations of SDG and taking turns. During the conversation, Shara presented the following three goals: quality education, gender equality and clean water and sanitation, whereas Mia presented poverty, zero hunger and good health and well-being. During the presentations, the girls recurrently shared experiences and family histories. Their voices became increasingly more personal throughout the conversation. They reported their group work in a somewhat distant tone, using disciplinarily relevant terms and expressions. However, when sharing experiences, they used a personal tone. The girls’ funds of knowledge from lived experiences opened and allowed for the emergence of a dialogic space that made multivocality personally meaningful to them. Their family histories emerged as a characteristic and became forceful in our analyses of the dialogue sequence.

In Table 1, the girls discuss SDG 4: Quality Education.

Table 1 Discussion on Quality Education, SDG 4
Full size table

We identified a slightly distant perspective (in Table 1) when Shara (2) said ‘this stuff’ when referring to the SDGs and when Shara (3) generalised with “a lot of parents”. Each time they started to present a new goal, they returned to a somewhat distant manner of reporting. We interpreted the generalisation as a point of departure in the authoritative ESD discourse, while a more personal tone might indicate an alternative discourse.

Mia’s presentation of SDG 1: No Poverty exemplified the opportunity for sharing personal family experiences about helping each other (Table 2).

Table 2 Sharing family experiences
Full size table

Mirroring and confirming each other, they recurrently used examples from their own families.

Table 3 illustrates SDG 2: Zero Hunger, presenting Mia’s and Shara’s responses.

Table 3 Mia’s and Shara’s responses to SDG 2
Full size table

Here Shara also included the teacher’s introduction to SD issues, and hence funds of knowledge from the science classroom. We identified this presentation of the earlier group work as reported speech. In the excerpt in Table 3, Shara handled a polyphony of voices from her group.

Shara’s contribution to the conversation gave voice to her group’s readings and reflections on the teacher’s lesson on food transport in the world. One example of how Shara verbalised multivocality is when she said, ‘We who worked together thought about how in Norway everyone has access to clean drinking water, apart from the Romani, gypsy migrants”.

An example of the forcefulness of sharing family stories is when the girls talked about water and sanitation, they involved each other in reflections and personal feelings about their experiences from visits to their parents’ home countries.

They also referred to their friends’ participating in community work, and they shared concerns about dilemmas such as the effect of giving money to organisations that work in poor countries, as depicted in Table 4.

Table 4 Feelings related to dilemmas
Full size table

Mia and Shara gave voice to what one, you or they (probably would) say. They used the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I think’, and Mia even ‘I cried’. Further, they used themselves as examples of how young people are living in Norway, presenting narratives about discarded chewing gum wrappers on the street, finishing meals in order to reduce food waste and recycling old clothes. We note this as reported speech and a recurrent aspect of the ESD discourse in Norway. Mia and Shara shared their thoughts about what they could do as individuals (in line with the task given) to promote a sustainable future. They also gave voice to perspectives that they did not appreciate. During both the introductions to the goals and the subsequent discussions, they repeated the forceful phrasing ‘a society for our grandchildren’. We view this phrase as reported speech from the textbook, an expression also used by the teacher in the introduction. Later, Shara also presented her group’s reflections on the importance of the development of the welfare state, related to SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. We noted the girls’ positive attitude towards the welfare state as an important driving force in their conversation.

Sometimes the conversation changed direction quite suddenly. This seemed to happen when an utterance—from Shara, for instance—prompted Mia to make an association with her personal beliefs. One example of this was when Shara talked about education in the Norwegian welfare state. Mia (4) stated her personal view on private schools (see Table 1). In our analyses, this appeared to represent a forceful common ground in the conversation, since this new direction seemed to meet the approval of Shara (4). The conversation continued in this new direction, as if it had not been interrupted. This topic seemed to be well agreed upon. Their meaning-making of the complexity of the SDGs emerged as deepened common ground during their conversation.

Outlining issues of SDGs

We and others in the Norwegian welfare state

Mia’s and Shara’s trust in the welfare state was revealed when they discussed the SDGs. The girls indicated that they belonged to a privileged we as members of the welfare state. Membership in the welfare state does, however, carry obligations, and it entails, in the girls’ view, being both able and willing to take responsibility for one’s own life.

The other was not a fixed category in this conversation, but a rather flexible label. The girls were concerned with how others living in Norway can ‘become one of us’, as well as with what the Norwegian welfare state can offer to us. Mia stated:

You receive a free education, and we must make use of the opportunities given to us that we take for granted. I am one of those who takes them for granted.

According to the girls, the others need information about the options available to them in the welfare state. As Mia explained:

For instance, in Norway, everyone has a right to education, and if someone cannot afford said education in Norway, we have the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund, which can provide a stipend or loan.

We who give something to others

Belonging to the we membership of the welfare state entails a set of moral and ethical standards and obligations, according to the girls. As Mia expressed:

We shouldn’t throw away clothes. We can donate them to charitable organisations and institutions dealing with impoverished people; it’s something I think is actually very important to do. We can make them kind of feel like they are a part of society too.

Here we see one of the repeated distinctions the girls make between we and the others. The others, in their parents’ respective homelands, from the girls’ perspective, need help from us—that is, people in Norway who send money through an ideal organisation or charity, here explained by Shara:

What we, every individual, can do is contribute with money to countries that lack water and sanitation measures. And as mentioned before, there are organisations which help poor countries drill wells and thereby provide people with access to clean water.

However, the issue is not one-sided. The others who lack resources also donate. As Shara stated, ‘I feel like those who don’t have much, they have good hearts, because they give away things to others in need’. The recurring use of we/others as a dichotomy became more complex as the conversation evolved.

We women

Trust in the welfare state was a recurring theme during the conversation, except when discussing the goal of achieving gender equality and empowerment for women and girls. Here, the girls forcefully expressed frustration over the fact that men and women are not treated equally in workplaces, despite laws and regulations championed by the women’s liberation movement, which should have already secured such equality. As an example of this, Shara remarked:

For women to have achieved equality here, they had to put in a lot of effort. They demonstrated and took responsibility for the procurement of their and future generations’ rights. In Norway, we still have a problem with wage inequality between men and women. There isn’t any gender equality here, not really. I would understand it [wage inequality] if the men had worked longer hours than their female colleagues, but I feel that is rarely the case.

Here, the girls expressed a sense of belonging to a we, as in we women. This expression of solidarity with their own gender, that they brought into the conversation, we construe as a potential for opening up an alternative Discourse.

SD issues becoming many-sided for the students

Later, when the girls evaluated the SDG tasks, they commented on the topics they had discussed and worked with:

We started out thinking about Norway, but at the same time, as we explored Norway, we were also learning a lot about other countries that one maybe didn’t consider earlier. It was a bit like ‘this is how it is’, but now there’s a deeper understanding of the materials we’re reading. (Shara)

Mia added:

We talked about sustainability being the need for countries to help each other. Then I thought about the issue of poverty. If we don’t have poverty, we automatically have communism, which is an ideology one would prefer not to follow, although it has some strengths. It would, however, lead to a dictatorship, and that would be unfortunate.

A complexity seemed to emerge during their conversation about SDGs and the narratives that they shared. How the girls’ understanding of SD appeared to develop during their conversation is an important finding. They started out with a consumer perspective, one that paralleled the status quo position as outlined by Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien (2005) and in line with the ESD discourse in the Norwegian curriculum. They then talked recurrently about governance issues and the welfare state. The girls touched on injustice issues, and necessity of political changes, prompted by their family histories. We construed the development of the conversation as an indication of a move towards discovering necessity of alternative Discourses and transition (Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien 2005).

Discussion

Our central ambition in this article was to explore how a plurality of thoughts and voices can contribute to a more dynamic and open learning environment in ESD. We explored how two girls in their first year of upper secondary school drew on different funds of knowledge in a conversation about SD goals. The approach taken in the article draw on conceptual ideas of the third space, funds of knowledge (Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo 2004) and othering (Bhabha 1994). Further, SD being a vague concept with several possible interpretations, we presented Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien (2005) three wide interpretations of SD: status quo, reformative and transformative. These interpretations diverge concerning what types of changes are considered necessary in societies to realise SD.

Our analysis indicated that Mia and Shara, by drawing on alternative funds of knowledge, had capabilities to challenge the Norwegian ESD discourse. Hence, they potentially gave space for alternative Discourses. Their insight deepened during the conversation and tended to move in a direction of the transition perspectives (Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien 2005). In the opening of their conversation, the girls seemed to draw on a reformative approach to SD. Their focus was mainly on local solutions and individual private actions, as discussed by Bonal and Fontdevila (2017). This focus having similarities to approaches in environmental education, rather than to critical, civic and justice-oriented education. Research on science education in Norway as well as ESD practices in Norwegian schools, draw mainly on the UN’s definition of sustainable development, positioned in the paradigm of economic growth, classified by Hopwood, Mellor and O’Brien (2005) as a reformative approach to SD. Political, social, and economic mobilisation may be omitted (Waldron, Ruane, Oberman and Morris 2019).

The conversation comprised examples of positioning that were more dynamic than a mere dichotomy between we and the others. Their family backgrounds represented personal experiences. Mia and Shara gave personal voice to two kinds of groups to which they both belonged. First, having been raised in Norway, their utterances indicated we as citizens in the Norwegian welfare state. Second, they drew on personal experiences from their parents’ homelands, evoking a we that expresses personal, primary experiences from outside Norway. This we was also addressed when the girls described themselves as we ‘foreigners’, thus presenting themselves in the gaze of others. And not least outside the classroom, the diversity was pertinent among the students.

Nothing in the girls’ conversation suggests that they understood equality as ‘sameness’ (Gullestad 2006), but throughout the conversation, they made a clear distinction between the Norwegian others who are situated in marginalised positions in the Norwegian welfare state and the others in their parents’ homeland. When discussing the Norwegian others, Mia and Shara seemed to apply a reformative perspective. They did not root the problem in the nature of the present society. The Norwegian others—the homeless, the poor, Romani migrants, etc.—are, according to Mia and Shara, in need of knowledge and information about what the welfare state has to offer.

During the conversation, a conception of the others in their parents’ homelands as others in need of help and as a burden moved towards a common responsibility, more in line with a transformative perspective on SD. The open, non-graded task given by the teacher enabled Mia and Shara to use narratives from their own lived experiences—their social and cultural funds of knowledge. Concerning clean water, they also elaborated on differences in Norway. They emphasised that in Norway, almost everyone, except the Romani migrants, have access to clean drinking water. From local examples, they compared with narratives from their parents’ homelands, for example about drilling of wells in order to provide people with access to clean water. They alternated between we who are inside—or outside—the Norwegian welfare state; we who can relate to being a Norwegian (local); and we who can also relate to we who have personal connections outside the Norwegian borders (global). Further, Mia expressed the capability of the other to prompt transition and change when she expressed a global political view on the issue of poverty: “We talked about sustainability being the need for countries to help each other. Then I thought about the issue of poverty”. We construe this as Mia taking a personal political stand. This statement from Mia seemed to legitimate a move of the focus of the SD discourse from a maintenance of present social and economic structures towards a future that does not first and foremost have to be linked to economic growth. This calls for changes in ESD to comprise social justice and plurality of voices (Lundegård and Wickman 2009).

When SDG’s are construed as individual projects, it imposes a lot of responsibility on children and adolescents. We have claimed the necessity of transformative approaches to SD and a need for problematizing political aspects of Norwegian ESD discourse. Thomas Piketty’s (2020) critique of increasing economic inequity in the western world as being justified, created and reproduced by political ideologies should be noted. When society places so much emphasis on individual choices, dilemmas are created in education. Based on the data and discussion presented, this study cannot draw conclusions regarding ES(D) in Norwegian classrooms in general. The dialogue we analysed in this article tended to be captured in a reform Discourse of SD, and the responsibility is placed with the individual. Further, a Norwegian Discourse of sameness (Gullestad 2006) may have prevented discussions on injustice and inequity, and political critique.

However, we also construe the conversation as providing potential space for alternative discourses, and a polyphony of voices, since the two girls had the opportunity to share everyday family histories and use personal funds of knowledge.

The dominating SD discourse in Norwegian education to a great extent regards Development. ESD in Norway can benefit from a polyphonic approach (Wegerif 2011) in whole class situations. The challenge will be to legitimate alternative narratives, represent a diversity of people and different parts of the world (Ideland and Malmberg 2014, 2015).  A polyphonic approach is crucial, in order to emphasise ES(D) as a global concern, and an ongoing process (Lundegård and Wickman 2009). Another challenge for teachers would be to determine which examples would provide sufficient space in the ESD classroom for all students so that they can develop knowledge, capacities and capabilities for civic action and participation based on their own life experiences and beliefs about a sustainable future. Following Lundegård and Caiman (2019), pedagogical approaches to ESD should foreground democratic teaching processes at the centre of ESD.

To counterbalance the reproduction of otherness, one cannot shy away from the problems of conflicts of interests and problems with burden sharing between rich and poor nations (Ideland and Malmberg 20142015). Referring to Bhabha (1994) and third-space theories, an open, spatial relationship is necessary to obtain multiple sources of knowing and discourse (Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo 2004). Further research is needed to improve the analysis of the plurality of classroom activity and develop science teaching classroom activities in ESD that address global injustice as well as political, social, and economic concerns.