Learning from Bad Practice in Environmental and Sustainability Education

Learning from Bad Practice in Environmental and Sustainability Education illuminates the notion of bad practice from the perspective of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) and how it is possible to learn from it in order to avoid the relentless pitfalls and blind spots that are part of any educational field. Combining lessons from Danish and South Korean NGOs involved in both formal and non-formal ESE with emerging theoretical perspectives on education, the important question is: Why do practitioners, educators and researchers have such a hard time dealing with the challenges of bad practice and is it possible to understand bad practice as not only something that mars the educational purpose of ESE, but also as something that at the same time protects the very ideals we find in the fields. Through empirical analysis, and theoretical perspectives from Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Slavoj Žižek, Learning from Bad Practice in Environmental and Sustainability Education argues how we, as teachers, practitioners and researchers can learn from bad practice and move beyond the comfortable position of finger pointing and push for more genuine good practice.

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard (PhD 2012, Aarhus University, Denmark) is Associate Professor in Education Science and Global Social Challenges at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published widely on notions of bad practice and new notions of materialisms in education. His recent publications include: "Education between discourse and matter," in Nature in Education (Peter Kemp, Ed., 2015), with Kristoffer Lolk Fjeldsted, and "The significance of ‘participation’ as an educational ideal in education for sustainable development and health education in schools," in Environmental Education Research (2015), with Venka Simovska.