Page 118 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

9 Communicating Education for Sustainable Development 101

The heterogeneity of meanings and functions also shows that the term education
comprises different knowledges. It is a truism that it is impossible to discern any
single detail of a complex explanandum. A condition for its analysis is that it be
reduced, or operationalised. This is accompanied by (over)simplifications, as well
as by a selective accentuation of aspects considered to be, or negotiated as, impor-
1
tant. The operationalistic reduction of education in conjunction with the monitor-
ing of educational systems can be done by means of indicators. These would allow
the acquisition of knowledge about selected aspects of the concept education.
An anthropological perspective studies the social meaning of education and
assumes a subconscious and practical knowledge that avoids being easily fixed. It is
apparent that from this perspective the recent occurance of the‘evaluative habitus’,
the measurement of education, will be viewed critically. Measuring, in particular
measuring and assessing outputs, is accompanied with reductionism, the reduction
of education to performance variables (Radtke 2003). This is also true for ESD.

Towards the Measurement of Education
for Sustainable Development

Considering the many different goals and contents of ESD, it would be problematic
to make general statements about ESD. In addition there are many didactic possi-
bilities and places of learning, non- and informal learning as well as many addressees
of ESD, including children and young people, teachers, teacher trainers, consum-
ers, organisational leaders as well as political and administrative decision-makers.
All of these target groups will have a more or less clear idea about the goals of
ESD, but they will also have their own goals as well and will be more or less will-
ing and able to actively pursue them. Recent research also shows that competences
are situationally upgraded in connection with so-called domain-specific knowl-
edge, that is by means of concrete requirements and specifications. And since the
lives of these groups of individuals will without doubt be different it will not be
possible to assume that they have the same competences – much less that these
competences can be investigated in detail with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instrument.
Learning conditions can be regulated to different degrees and as such the spec-
trum of what could be expected is quite large. While in the formal educational sec-
tor for example the attempt could certainly be made to implement contentual aspects
of ESD, in the non-formal educational sector this is by definition impossible. To this
extent it is extremely difficult to make generalisations about the effectiveness of
measures regarding the acquisition of competences or, on the systemic level, about
‘the’ quality of ESD.

1 Insofar the chosen tools are not nearly just neutral measures or signs of the consequences of
an intervention (Frønes 2007: 20).