Rethinking Bildung in the Anthropocene: The Case of Wolfgang Klafki

Abstract

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.

Monitoring SDG 4.7: Assessing Education for Sustainable Development in policies, curricula, training of educators and student assessment (input‐indicator)

“…Finally, while there is a tendency to focus on what is easy to measure using existing data, we join various other scholars in arguing that it is critical to aim for assessments that actually measure what is important for achieving the targets set (e.g., Brockwell et al, 2022; McCool & Stankey, 2004). Ultimately, consistently linking education with sustainability in times of mounting unsustainability crises is closely connected to what education is fundamentally about: to empower learners to understand and address the key epochal problems of any given time (Klafki, 1996; Kvamme, 2021).…”

Traces of Bildung in Upper Secondary Science Education: A Critical Investigation of Chemistry Teachers’ Orientation Towards Promoting Bildung in Chemistry Education

“…Recent publications concerning Bildung point to Bildung as being concerned with an inward self-examination (self-reflexivity) that enables a responding to key issues/problems associated with the Bildung subject's surrounding context (Buttigieg & Calleja, 2021;Kvamme, 2021;Ørbech Jensen, 2021;Riese & Hilt, 2021). Significantly, this process of self-examination is seen as taking place in a perspective of humans as relationally bound and indivisible from the world (Buttigieg & Calleja, 2021;Kvamme, 2021;Ørbech Jensen, 2021;Riese & Hilt, 2021;Rømer, 2021;Ryen & Jøsok, 2023;Waterman-Evans, 2022). In this view, the surrounding context and the Bildung subject are both seen as being fundamentally "a part" of Bildung.…”

“…In a contemporary sense, this might mean a process of subjectification in which subjects, in coming to a critically reflexive stance, are capable of successfully responding to key issues/problems associated human impacts on the systems of the Earth (e.g. Buttigieg & Calleja, 2021;Kvamme, 2021;Ørbech Jensen, 2021;Riese & Hilt, 2021).…”

6. Ecodialogues about picturebooks

“…Ole A. Kvamme (2021) further emphasises Wolfgang Klafki's position in his later works on the danger of cementing national and normative views in education, and Kvamme recaps Klafki's view that education should be "initiating students in unresolved societal challenges that determine their future" (Kvamme, 2021, p. 5).…”