Exploring Poetry in Dialogue: Learning as Sustainable Development in the Literary Classroom

The climate crisis entails devastating changes for non-human and human life forms alike. This also has epistemological consequences since it places humans in a situation of fundamental uncertainty. Dealing with global risks grows increasingly difficult, and is a core issue in sustainable development (Goldin and Mariathasan 212). This constitutes a challenge to teachers of literature: how are we to choose texts and methods that help students deal with such complexity? I aim to answer this by empirically investigating the collaborative meaning-making of one group of student teachers discussing poetry. A central motivation for this study is the Norwegian school curricula. Revised in 2020, the curricula include “sustainability” as one of three interdisciplinary topics to be covered in all subjects.1 The student teachers in this study specialize in language and literature to teach at grade levels 1—10 in the Norwegian public school system. While reading, writing, and other forms of literary and linguistic competence are central to L1 teachers, they are now arguably also teachers of sustainable development. The guiding research question for this study is thus: what can subject-specific Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in literature education look like? Empirical research on classroom teaching can provide a nuanced view of this. While couched in a Norwegian context, the findings of this study will be relevant to teachers of literature elsewhere seeking to integrate sustainability in their classrooms.