Sustainable development teaching in view of qualification, socialisation and person-formation

This chapter presents a model for how to plan sustainability teaching taking into account three functions of education: qualification, socialisation and person-formation. ‘Qualification’ is about equipping students with knowledge, skills and understandings that prepare them for a specific task. ‘Socialisation’ means transferring certain values, attitudes, norms and worldviews in line with the prevailing standards of a particular community or tradition. ‘Person-formation’ is connected to the formation of the self: the cultivation of personality, the process of personal maturation. The latter can take the form identification, i.e. developing a specific identity in relation to qualification and socialisation, or subjectification, i.e. developing mature and independent ways of being and acting in the world. Qualification, socialisation and person-formation are intertwined in educational practice. Every teaching has a certain meaning-making in the forefront while there are always other meanings that follow automatically, in the background: ‘companion meanings’. Hence, teaching is always a value-laden activity. All knowledge content simultaneously and inevitably offers students particular ways of reasoning about the world and their place in it while omitting other possible perspectives and worldviews