Environmental and sustainability education is briefly delineated as a research field internationally and within a Norwegian context, followed by a presentation of the particular contributions to this special issue.

In this article, I discuss education in a time in the history when the human impact on Earth is massive and pervasive, with devastating consequences on the conditions for life. Within various academic fields, this era is increasingly distinguished as the Anthropocene. The term highlights the new, dominant position of the human species in Earth’s history, but is contentious, hiding as much as it reveals. Humanity is surely not one, but many, participating in a complex web of relations constituted by other species and the material world. Moreover, the Anthropocene is also a time of global corporate capitalism, when the magnitude and the consequences of human activities are unequally distributed among humans and more-than humans alike. The ethical and political dimensions involved in this determine the reflections in this article. Specifically, I examine Wolfgang Klafki’s educational theory as an expression of and a response to the Anthropocene. Klafki is a salient contributor to the rethinking of North European general didactics in the 20th century, in which Bildung, formations of the self, plays a key role. In Klafki’s later works, epochal key problems are integrated in his concept of Bildung, addressing environmental crisis, social inequity, and threats to peace on Earth, in a global outlook that transcends Bildung’s traditionally national scope. At the same time, Klafki’s educational response expresses an anthropocentric outlook, which calls for rethinking. In such a rethinking I suggest to see the mediating element of the common, crucial in Klafki’s Bildung theory, not as limited to human interests but as including concerns for life on Earth, and to conceive of historical situatedness as an aspect of the commonality of Bildung.

Education for sustainable development as presented by UNESCO involves a value dimension which is both pivotal and problematic. Pivotal, because values concern what matters to beings, problematic because the values brought forward are formulated as universal values, with the risk of suppressing the plurality of context.The first part of the article develops a theoretical approach for a research project on environmental ethical values in moral education which accommodates for both universality and context. While the scope is mainly theoretical, some empirical material is brought in to illustrate and exemplify. The school subject involved includes religious education, and the empirical material shows that religion is a part of the context. However, this aspect is not accentuated in the theoretical approach presented.The second part is a mediation between this theoretical approach on moral education and the interpretive approach addressing religious education. The aim is to explore common ground, uncover factual tension and reflect on how both moral education and religious education may contribute to environmental and sustainability education.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the school strikes for climate, initiated in August 2018 by the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, soon to become a global social movement involving hundreds of thousands of students. I examine 10 speeches of Thunberg as recontextualizations of environmental ethical values that have been formulated within the context of United Nations. With this approach, guided by an ethical and educational interest grounded in moral education, and informed by conceptions of Seyla Benhabib, this paper demonstrates how students become democratic citizens appropriating the concern for future generations as a cosmopolitan claim in a resistance to exclusions from current politics.

The Norwegian high-school drama series Skam is produced and published by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, a publicly funded institution distinguished by an explicit obligation to the public interest, not only serving their audience as consumers but even as citizens. Generally, the normativity expressed in Skam may be summarized by treating all with respect, involving not only moral considerations of what is right, but also ethical conceptions of what is good, offered, opened up and obstructed by the living social order established there. In season three, given attention here, the plot revolves around issues concerning same-sex relationships, mental disorder and religion. Here Skam becomes interesting for the field of moral education, elaborating on how to encounter the challenges of pluralistic societies that undergo continuous changes and in which common values have become open questions. In this paper attention is drawn toward Skam’s ethical dimension, considering Skam as an instance of public moral education. Faced with tensions, hindrances and conflicts, the norm of treating all with respect, irrespective of how trivial it may appear outside of context, becomes loaded with meaning, while the actualization of the good life is at risk. Appalling is the way hegemonic religion is transformed in the living social order. Decisive is the active role taken by the youths in the series, recontextualizing the norm. The social order here is not a static, given condition, but a continuous, moving, cultivating project. In that respect, a certain democratic aspect of the public moral education of Skam also becomes visible. Together, the youths portrayed in the series seem to accommodate a variety of expressions of life emerging within their community.