Research topic/aim

Civics teachers are assumed to promote democracy as an ideal (Skolverket 2017: 1), while at the same time showing that democracy has no clear definition (cf. Dahl 2008; Held 2006). They are also expected to shed light on questions about – and preferably advocate – sustainable development (cf. Unesco 2012; Unesco et al. 2018; Skolverket 2017: 3). However, a basic democratic principle is that everyone has the right to hold any views and opinions – even in matters relating to sustainable development. Civics teachers are thus expected to advocate pupils’ political interest, for example by encouraging engagement in sustainability issues, while at the same time defending fundamental values of democracy, which permeate the school’s governing documents. Nonetheless, it is easy to imagine classroom situations where democratic values and sustainable development conflict. Pupils may for instance argue for the urgency of handling the ecological crisis and that this calls for the necessity to overrule parliamentary democracy because it is considered too “slow” or too tied up with economic interests – which are well known weaknesses of parliamentary/liberal democracy (e.g. Eckersley 2004). Another possibility is that pupils oppose proposed solutions to sustainability problems with democratic arguments. Thus, it is relevant to explore how civics teachers handle situations when conflicts occur. The aim of this paper is to

1. Provide empirical illustrations of how this conflict manifests in teaching situations.

2. Analyse how teachers handle these didactical challenges.

Theoretical framework

The potential clash between democracy and sustainable development constitutes a political conflict. Political conflicts in the classroom can be dealt with in various ways. Two distinctive ways that acknowledge conflicts are

1) through deliberation, where the teacher tries to overcome conflicts trough rational deliberation, and

2) through agonism, where the teacher instead enables “conflicts to be played out politically and democratically” (Tryggvason and Öhman 2019: 120). How teachers handle the didactic challenges in this study are analysed through the concepts of deliberation and agonism (cf. Ruitenberg 2009;Englund 2016; Tryggvason 2018; Tryggvason and Öhman 2019; Koutsouris et al. 2022).

Methodological design

The data consists of semi-structured interviews with civics teachers in upper secondary schools in Sweden. In upper secondary school we can expect to find the most democratically mature and knowledgeable pupils among adolescents in Sweden.

Expected conclusions/findings

The paper is expected to provide empirical illustrations of how democracy and sustainable development issues conflict incivics classrooms as well as how teachers use deliberative and agonistic didactic tools to meet such conflicts.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

The potential conflicts and synergies between two “greater goods” – democracy and sustainable development – are of particular relevance in an educational context where these values are particularly promoted, and where the subject of civics is interpreted in a relatively pluralistic manner.