Losing traction and the art of slip-sliding away: Or, getting over education for sustainable development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This response problematizes Stefan Bengtsson's (2016 Bengtsson, S. L. (2016). Hegemony and the politics of policy-making for education for sustainable development: A case study of Vietnam. Journal of Environmental Education, 47(2), 77–90.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) defense of education for sustainable development. He argues that sustainable development and education for sustainable development are not globalizing and hegemonic discourses, as some have claimed, and uses case-study analysis of Vietnamese policy documents to support his claims. He observes contestation and dissensus within these documents, and that, for him, is at odds with his conceptions of hegemony and paradigmatic status. He also suggests that this dissensus provides openings for opposition and resistance. I argue, on the contrary, that disagreement, dissent, anomalies, and counter-hegemonic forces have always been part of hegemonic struggles and paradigmatic states—and shifts. Bengtsson and I do agree about the importance of dissensus and resistance; however, important choices remain to be made about what concepts and contexts of dissensus are most educationally valuable. For example, I show that Bengtsson's Vietnamese policy data suggests that although dissensus exists, sustainable development and education for sustainable development have had little impact in generating counter-hegemonic discourse, resistance, anomalous responses, or creative alternatives in the environmental and social policy. Based on the data, sustainable development does not seem to have much traction. I argue that a useful approach would be to focus on understandings currently absent or underrepresented in contemporary education. Particularly important are the understandings required to think differently and to become different beings. Throughout, attention has been given to developing educational experiences that arise that shift the way learners carry themselves in the world, enact their etiquette, and broaden their ontological positioning, and commensurate understandings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".