Georg, Andree

This proceedings volume gathers papers presented at the symposium “Cultural Appropriation of Spaces and Things” held in Siegen, Germany in October 2019. All over the world, children are confronted with an increasingly complicated and fast-moving world. Children need elementary cultural techniques and skills to shape their own lives and enable them to find individual interpretations of meaning. In addition to the acquisition of classical cultural techniques such as arithmetic, writing and reading, the competent handling of spaces and things – through manifold processes of appropriation and reflection – is crucial. It forms the basis and prerequisite for the development of competences or abilities that are suitable for understanding the dimensions, the complexity and changeability of their world and enable them to critically deal with associated problems and find appropriate solutions. The aim of the conference was to find suitable ways for children all over the world for a methodically and didactically guided examination of their natural, social and technical environment. At the same time, the aim was to achieve a mutual enrichment of monodisciplinary research accesses. It also included a self-critical reflection of one’s own culturally shaped approaches of research.

The term sustainability is omnipresent in everyday language. This gives the impression that the interpretation of what is or could be sustainable not only varies slightly, but also diverges across a broader spectrum. “Sustainability” is instrumentalized by the most diverse interest groups for their respective purposes: Sustainable consumption, sustainable growth, sustainable stock market returns - do they really exist? This mixture of interpretations and knowledge leads to a completely inconsistent and barely comprehensible concept of sustainability, which has also become established in common parlance. This paper uses various examples to show that the school sector also suffers from this little reflected approach. Even a clear definition of the concept of sustainability is all too often a desideratum in schools, which inevitably leads to intellectual difficulties that naturally prevent adequate competencies for action. The curriculum analysis of the concept of sustainability shows that the topic is of little importance in the teaching context. “Sustainability” is not defined by way of example, but instead appears in different contexts and connotations. When examining teaching materials for schools, this ambiguity is clearly recognizable: sustainability is predominantly used to describe processes in the sense of “lasting”. If sustainability is to be used as a criterion in other cases, there is usually no definition given. As shown in this doctoral thesis, it can also be demonstrated on the basis of students' views and behaviors that they are hardly focused on the classic idea of sustainability - namely the regenerative capacity of resources. The dissertation takes these findings as its starting point and sets itself the main goal of placing the discussion on sustainability in schools on a solid scientific basis. This is based on the classic sustainability discourse, which, however, requires a conceptual expansion. This expansion proposed by the author is aimed at aspects of sustainability that are frequently mentioned in today's social discussion on the one hand and can be derived from the idea of classical sustainability on the other. There are five aspects of sustainability, whose interaction is being explained, form the basis of a model of a “sustainability traffic light” proposed by the author. This “sustainability traffic light” makes it possible to deal with the complex of sustainability in a targeted manner, for example a discussion of different issues in the classroom guided by criteria. The primary aim is not to assign the “label” of sustainability, but to compare and weigh up different civilizational behaviors. In addition, tasks are provided for lessons to illustrate sustainability in practice. This enables conceptually clean and fact-based intellectual discussions on the topic of sustainability in the classroom.

Georg, Andree

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