ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on teachers’ influence on students’ learning regarding the political dimension of sustainable development. By employing specific teacher moves, teachers can affect how the political is experienced in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). ‘Political moves’ can be used in order to give shape to an ESE practice as a ‘conflict-oriented political deliberation’ in which students raise and defend conflicting standpoints regarding how to organise society in the face of sustainability problems. Different types of political moves are distinguished: controversy-creating moves, hierarchizing moves and excluding-including moves. Performing them opens up opportunities for students to personally experience the judgements, prioritisations and decision-making about different and competing alternatives that are involved in the question how to organise society sustainably - and to learn from that experience. Teachers can also perform moves that steer the activity away from conflict-oriented deliberation, for example by staging a ‘normative deliberation’ through reinstating moves, norm-installing moves and rationalising moves. The teacher’s choice of which moves to employ very differently affect how the political is experienced in educational practice.
