Reflexivity as Social Responsibility in Environment & Sustainability Education (ESE) Research

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reflexivity as a Vital Practice in Environmental and Sustainability Education.

Proposal

Within CIES’s greater 2021 theme, the ESE SIG invites researchers to reflect on ‘our moral and social responsibility to maintain planetary boundaries’. This presentation addresses the theme by discussing the role of ESE researchers in facing a rapidly changing world. The goal of this presentation is to illustrate the importance of researchers’ reflexivity in ESE research.

Humanity is confronted with numerous challenges, including climate change and the destabilization of ecosystems, which pose existential threats to life on Earth (IPBES, 2019; IPCC, 2018; Rockström et al., 2009). Against this backdrop, scholars from diverse fields, including ESE, are questioning whether current research practices can work effectively given the urgency and scale of these societal, political and ecological challenges (e.g. Kläy et al., 2015; Lingard, 2020; Nowotny et al., 2013; Van Poeck, 2019). Closely related to the discussion about research practice is that of diverse perspectives on the underlying and implicit conceptions of researchers’ roles of social responsibility (e.g. Macintyre and Chaves 2007; Peters and Wals 2013; Reid 2003; 2020).

One perspective on the role of the ESE researcher is to position ourselves as experts who gather and analyze empirical data on educational practices. These findings then serve as the basis for informing decision-making or shifting practitioners’ conventions. However, critiques of this “linear expert-driven research” (Wals and Van der Leij, 1997) often question its impact on policy and practice (König, 2018), despite ways in which the uptake of the research results vary. Another perspective stems from an activist grounding in which ESE researchers advocate for a particular idea or agenda, such as mainstreaming and scaling up ESD. Yet, some scholars have raised concerns about having their voices––and the critical concepts they carry––co-opted into the dominant discourse, thereby increasing the risk of losing the academic’s critical and emancipating power over time (Reid, 2020; see also Cornwall & Brock 2005). In reflecting on the ongoing change in knowledge production and its influence on the role of the researcher, Læssøe, Feinstein and Blum (2013) thus call on ESE researchers to be neither critically detached, nor naively involved in the processes of an interactive policy-engaged approach to research. Similarly, Van Poeck and Lingard (2016) argue for “letting ESE researchers be researchers” (p.315, original emphasis), attempting to reclaim a role as critical friends of decisionmakers and practitioners.

More recently, a shift is underway from an expert-driven to a practitioner- or participatory-driven research paradigm. Most predominant is the growing engagement with “transformational research” (Wiek and Lang, 2016), which largely emerged from the scholarship in development and sustainability science. With a transformational orientation, ESE researchers are primarily concerned with generating actionable knowledge and providing evidence for how to intervene in real-world problems in order to resolve or mitigate them. Often, research is carried out through a process involving continuous adaptation and experimentation, as well as collective learning and close collaboration between academic and non-academic stakeholders (Clark and Dickson, 2003; Talwar et al., 2011; Lang et al., 2012). However, what has not been made clear among the transformational ESE scholars is the methodological position; that is: is taking on a transformational research orientation an instantiation of postmodern relativism per se or is it to be considered as a pragmatist stance? Overlooking such reflection as ESE researchers risks falling into so called “epistemic fallacy” (Bhaskar, 2010)––a reduction of ontology to epistemology in considering reality only as our knowledge of it.

These scholarly discussions highlight a need to strengthen the critical-reflexive dimension of current research practices to allow for both “wider ontological referents of environmental concerns” (Lotz-Sisitka, 2009, p.173) and ethical considerations of what should and can be done in ESE. This requires increased inquiry into how ESE research affects the researched; deeper reflection on what it means to work at the boundaries between science and society; and a reflexive consideration of what it means to embrace the multifaceted roles of ESE researchers, practitioners, policy entrepreneurs and other “inbetweeners” (Reid, 2020, p.20). In terms of epistemic reflexivity, this also requires ESE researchers to reflect further on our willingness to challenge our own taken-for-granted beliefs and disrupt our preferred positions––sometimes doxa as per Bourdieu (1972)––in favour of exploring new perspectives and alternative assumptions. Yet, not many studies have focused on the reflexivity of ESE researchers and only a few have shown how early career inter- and transdisciplinary researchers “negotiate an identity” (Lyall and Meagher 2012, p.613) or create “epistemic living spaces” (Felt et al., 2013, p.514).

As a group of early career researchers, our work spans the research orientations discussed above, including a descriptive-analytical research on examining a nationwide implementation of ESD policy; an action research on youth engagement with environmental change and sustainability pedagogy; a multi-stakeholder, participatory research on schools’ transitions to ESD; and a transformative research on disrupting the teaching, research and policy at a higher education institution. We thus argue, as do others (Lyall and Meagher 2012, Popa et al., 2015, Enright and Facer, 2017), that reflexivity is an essential process for ESE researchers who are not only expected to work in an inter- or transdisciplinary manner, but also often are motivated to transform society.

In the presentation, we will share findings and insights from our projects to shed light on the benefits and limitations of each of our research orientations. The goal is to nurture the ongoing search for new and pluralist methodological experiments for ESE. To this end, we focus on reflexivity as a vital practice for ESE researchers as the field is shaped by the nature of its contestability through the researchers’ strategies for social transformation. Highlighting different ontological and epistemological perspectives of our projects, the presentation responds to Reid’s (2020) call for creating reflexive research communities to give careful attention to “the nature of the research; the personal characteristics of the researchers and potential research users; the links between research and its users; and the context for the use of research” (p.19). It thus contributes to the methodological conceptualization of ESE research in relation to education, learning, sustainability transition, and societal transformation.

Authors

• Ying-Syuan Huang, McGill University

• Stephanie Leite, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

• Emily Sprowls, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University

• Blane Harvey, McGill University