Thinking about conflicts and resistance in teaching about sustainability

Since sustainable development is a wicked problem, it is not too surprising that also students in our classes come with different ideas of how to meet the challenges, and that that can lead to conflicts. I am doing some reading around how people deal with this in response to a colleague asking me what to do when students reject their authority and don’t want to learn from them because they feel that they are being taught the wrong things. Let’s see what the literature says! If you know of other, possibly more relevant, work, please let me know!

So these are short summaries of the papers that came up.

Lundegård & Wickman (2007): “Conflicts of interest: An indispensable element of education for sustainable development“.

Lundegård & Wickman (2007) argue that questions of sustainability “are always about conflicts of interest between (and within) human beings“. To deal with this, students need to learn to action competence: “instead of trying first and foremost to reach a quick majority decision or trying to find so-called objective solutions to a problem, deliberative democracy is expressed as, in an initial stage, letting people agree that they disagree, that is, to bring conflicts of interest to light.” But how can we support that in teaching? The method that Lundegård & Wickman (2007) suggest working with deliberative dialogues: “a dialogue on sustainable development implies that we come to talk about what people agree and disagree about, what people want and what they do not want, and what people are going to do and not do“.

That means that we first need to explore the complexity of the issue: “before we decide which facts we should collect in order to take a stand, we need to identify the many conflicts of interest that underlie the issue. Thus, in an educational context, the point of the teaching should not be to give the students facts first so that they can thereafter decide what they regard as relevant. Rather, since we have to know what we are involved in, the point of what we are doing, we have to attend to the value judgments before we can attend to the facts.” And it also means that we need to consider how we frame a topic. “In the classroom, it becomes important to give thought to who has the right to define what is included in the concept sustainable development. The questions we pose in the teaching situation and the conflicts of interest we focus on depend, of course, on what we choose to include in the concept. To teach from the starting point of empowerment means that we highlight those questions that the students regard as important for their future and that we create a climate of deliberation around those questions. Our study suggests that listening sensitively to what is being said opens up unlimited opportunities for starting up deliberative dialogues about these questions.”

Urberg (2026): “Conflicts of interest in environmental and sustainability education“

Urberg (2026) motivate that “a democratic transformation to a sustainable society requires broad support among citizens. A major challenge is, accordingly, addressing the contradictions and tensions between groups with different interests and ideological positions“. They therefore did an ethnographic study in a school where “teaching staff perceived a resistance to and tensions when teaching about sustainable development” in order to “provide improved understanding of conflicts of interest among students, with a specific focus on students resisting sustainable transformations to inform a more customised didactic approach to meet this group“.

Urberg (2026) found three main conflicts of interest: between self and others (putting yourself first because you have “earned” it, because you think you are so small that you cannot possibly have an impact, because you don’t think far into the future, because you don’t value non-human life or the environment equally high as your own), the future and the present (not caring about what happens after you are dead), and the centre and the periphery (taking care of your own area over others, thinking about power located in the capital that only cares about itself).

“from the vantage point of a pluralistic education, we can take advantage of conflicts of interest to address both political emotions and divergent interests to critically examine and act on them”

• making the abstract concrete and the distance relevant: “draw on students’ reflections and their embodied, lived experiences in the “here and now”, preferably in combination with a global/future perspective“. “Starting with the local and then looking outwards could lead to an appreciation of the complexity of wicked sustainability issues.“
• helping students develop the competences they need to take action and influence the future: “focus[..] on alternative visions for the future and strategies to bring about change and crucial when students resist or feel pessimistic about that future“

Holfelder (2022): “Teaching sustainability: A study of teachers and conceptual tensions“

The democratic paradox in sustainability puts teachers in the difficult position where, “on one hand, they should convey the importance and urgency of the topic, but at the same time, this should be done in such a way that students can form their own judgements“. In this study, teachers are interviewed and different approaches to dealing with it are presented represented in three extreme cases. In the first and second one, the tension is sidestepped: A teacher in a combination of fact-based and normative tradition, who focuses on specific sustainability topics that aren’t as controversial (like nutrition or waste management) and where the assumption is that more knowledge will lead to correct behavior and a lesson is successful if it influences behavior; and a teacher who is emotionally distant to the topic; strongly pluralistic and “attaches great importance to multi-perspectivity and systems thinking“, i.e. competence development. Only the third type lives in the tension: “concerned with social change and therefore teaching success is predominantly evaluated as a change in student behavior. [… However,] the teachers refer to general educational goals and emphasize that they should not or do not want to call on students to act“. For teacher education, this means that it is important to address the tension and how to deal with it.

Bengtsson et al. (2024): “Positioning controversy in environmental and sustainability education“

Bengtsson et al. (2024) write that “controversy plays an active role in the process of self-formation or subjectification in relation to any content“. They distinguish between “planned controversy […], where the teachers either present an issue as controversial outside the classroom or present it in a way where they expect the issue to become controversial in the classroom. Yet, even more often teachers speak about controversy in its second form, that is to occur spontaneously or unplanned […].” Relating to this, they mention the term “Schrödinger’s controversy“: whether something will become a controversy in the classroom or not is only determined the moment students react to it.

One way to make controversy less emotional in the classroom is, for example, to discuss interests of countries rather than of individuals. “Such a didactic framing of the controversy via larger entities related to an issue and the abstract character of an issue is, by us, interpreted as aligning with the limited approach to utilizing controversy. Emotional containment is here achieved by externalizing the controversy to entities outside the classroom or abstract norms and values.” But there is also the other way, where, “In this form of controversy, the conflict is between a specific position that students identify with and a contrasting position that is introduced by the teacher or other students regarding the content in question, and that as a result creates a controversy in terms of a personal conflict of identification.” Teachers might, in those cases, shut down any discussion: “In this instance, the controversy is, by us, interpreted to jeopardize the intentions of the teacher in terms of a priori-determined learning outcomes of the lesson. However, the strategy of putting a lid on is also applied for the sake of not hurting the didactic relationship between teacher and student and among students.”

But one way to avoid conflict is to think about didactic contracts. “What we mean by didactic contracts is that teachers and students establish together over time expectations on how instruction and dialogue in the classroom are to be understood. The “safe” didactic contract is, by us, interpreted as establishing a didactic sandbox, where discussions and dialogue in the classroom are separated from actual identity and acts of identification as expressions of self by the students.” This could also mean, as in one example in the paper, that a teacher “established a didactic contract where her students can discern between two different positions that the teacher can attain. On the one hand, they have learned that the teacher can make a statement that is not the teacher’s opinion or position towards an issue and that can or even should be argued against. On the other hand, there are statements marked as questions that the teacher frames as either correct or incorrect and that cannot be argued against.”

I find the framing in this article really helpful: “teachers “navigate” this tension by moving between normativity and openness/plurality, by suggesting that this balancing might relate to a tension between two ideals for education, that of qualification/socialization on the one hand side and that of subjectification on the other”

Konrad et al. (2020): “Embracing conflicts for interpersonal competence development in project-based sustainability courses“

Konrad et al. (2020) write: “Learning through and from conflicts within a learning community can foster competence development in teamwork, communication and stakeholder engagement. This study identified inner and outer conflicts (within individuals versus between individuals or groups) as potential drivers of learning processes, depending on strategies applied to address these conflicts.”

“the authors suggest the following conflict-embracing attitude to harvest learning processes:

• identifying conflicts at the source;
• accepting conflicts as challenges to be overcome before they get out of control;
• embracing conflicts as learning opportunities; and
• recognizing the learning outcomes“

So much for conflicts, but what about students rejecting a teacher’s authority?

Pace & Hemmings (2007): “Understanding authority in classrooms: A review of theory, ideology, and research“

Pace & Hemmings (2007) define that “Authority […] is a social relationship in which some people are granted the legitimacy to lead and others agree to follow“. There are different forms of authority:

• Traditional: “based on established beliefs that grant legitimacy to those in ruling positions“
• Charismatic: “when exceptional individuals evoke emotional attachment“
• Legal-rational: “supported by rules and policies based on rational values“
• Professional: “based on the expertise needed to achieve consensual aims” (arguably the most important one for most teachers)
• Moral: “teachers interpret the great moral ideas of their times and countries“

They summarize that “The general understanding we have derived from social theory is that the legitimacy of teachers as authority figures is not something that can be assumed but rather is granted during the course of ongoing interactions with students. Classroom authority is, above all else, a social construction that is built, taken apart, and rebuilt by teachers and students. These relations function in a variety of ways and to varying degrees in the service of a moral order that may be composed of shared norms, values, and purposes but more often than not is complicated by competing and contradictory values.”

Linqiong & Hu (2021): “Understanding teacher authority“

Aaaand another one on teacher authority: “Teacher authority can be better understood from the following four perspectives: a) Teacher authority gains its legitimacy from professional sources of tradition and institutional regulations and personal sources of expertise and charisma; b) Teacher authority functions through pedagogical discourse which legitimates forms of knowledge and justifies forms of power; c) Teacher authority is not so much a power possessed by teachers but resides in dynamic teacher-student relationships constructed by teachers’ educational practices and students’ concurrent reactions toward them; d) Teacher authority constitutes a moral order pursued and complied by both teachers and students for better effects of teaching and learning.”

On the flip side of challenging authority: the idea that we want active and critical students, and see subjectification as purpose of education!

Winkler & Rybnikova (2024): “Identity positions of the resisting student in the academic student resistance discourse“

This paper is really interesting since it is looking at power in who defines what is resistance. “[T]he student resistance discourse is established by and for academics. We highlight the privileged nature of this discourse as it reproduces and normalizes existing power relations in education. Academics, university teachers, and educational scholars are constituted as authorities, i.e. as the ones who know about student resistance and the role of students therein. Students, however, become positioned as powerless, i.e. the ones to be known without including students’ voices and the realities that these voices constitute“.

They write that “Contemporary understandings emphasize the social capital inherent in student resistance. Resistance is appreciated as an inevitable and inherently productive aspect of the transformation process that students experience in Higher Education“. And: “resistance is necessary for the learning process for students to become critical citizens” (my emphasis).

They identify six identity positions representing different patterns of how the student resistance literature frames resisters in the classroom:

• The resisting student as disobedient student, troublemakers, when the teacher cannot control the teaching process, aren’t charismatic leaders, …
• The resisting student as rebel against teachers’ misbehavior when teachers are incompetent, lazy, inactive, offensive, and students try to avoid harm to them or their learning
• The resisting student as victim of individual socialization: students are socialized into ways of knowing that prevent them from accepting the value of, and understanding, the knowledge provided by teacher (in context of not questioning meritocracy, …)
• The resisting student as opposing to be transformed: students resist teachers’ attempt to change their identity
• The resisting student as passive consumer of education: students don’t want to co-produce knowledge but rather passively consume
• The resisting student as emancipator: students oppose the educational system and seek agency and ownership.“understanding of student resistance as the students’ efforts to challenge an oppressive education system that attempts to silence them and thereby denies them to impact on the purpose, content and form of university education. In that sense, students are positioned to be on an emancipatory mission. … They recognize education as a system designed to reproduce power relations and discipline students; hence, they seek emancipation”

Phew, so much to think about!

Bengtsson, S., Hansson, P., Håkansson, M., & Östman, L. (2024). Positioning controversy in environmental and sustainability education. Environmental Education Research, 30(9), 1405-1431.

Holfelder, A. K. (2022). Teaching sustainability: A study of teachers and conceptual tensions. Discourse and Communication for Sustainable Education, 13(1), 77-87.

Konrad, T., Wiek, A., & Barth, M. (2020). Embracing conflicts for interpersonal competence development in project-based sustainability courses. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 21(1), 76-96.

Linqiong, L., & Hu, J. (2021). Understanding teacher authority. Journal of Education and Development, 5(2), 44-52.

Lundegård, I., & Wickman, P. O. (2007). Conflicts of interest: An indispensable element of education for sustainable development. Environmental Education Research, 13(1), 1-15.

Pace, J. L., & Hemmings, A. (2007). Understanding authority in classrooms: A review of theory, ideology, and research. Review of educational research, 77(1), 4-27.

Urberg, L. (2026). Conflicts of interest in environmental and sustainability education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 70(2), 302-315.

Winkler, I., & Rybnikova, I. (2024). Identity positions of the resisting student in the academic student resistance discourse. Teaching in Higher Education, 29(8), 1915-1933.

Wave watching!!

And reflections…