Abstract:
The recently concluded Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) embraced the notion that the social transformation required to address the potentially catastrophic environmental and social consequences of current human–environment relationships was best achieved through education – an acknowledgment that today’s children are society’s future decision makers. Society was asked to question the role of education and to examine how education works to support the continuity of current human–environment relationships. Education policy makers were asked to question the purposes of education and the ways in which policy might reflect and/or influence the social expectations of education. Educational institutions and educators were asked to question their practices, particularly with respect to the ways in which specific classroom pedagogies might prepare students to actively participate in, and therefore shape, their society into the future. And yet, in an investigation of the attempts of some Victorian primary schools and their teachers to address education for sustainable development through the implementation of a Sustainable Schools Program, a vast gap was observed between the rhetoric of the sustainable development educational goals of the program and the reality of the strict teacher-led pedagogies of the associated lessons. The educational rhetoric-reality gap is a well-documented phenomenon – formed here by the enthusiastic embrace of new ideas that are implemented only through long-favoured and well-established classroom practices. An obvious educational research context which leads first and foremost to the question: What must educational researchers question about their research practices? – not just in terms of what research questions to ask, but in terms of the types of insights that particular research practices generally provide, and what types of perspectives could new and different approaches reveal. This paper extends the notion that the responsibility for educational transformation, as an essential component of education for sustainable development, extends also to the practice of educational research, in this case, to reduce the development of educational rhetoric-reality gaps during the implementation of new programs. This paper provides an example of the use of Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, the basis of a research methodology not yet well-established in the field of educational research, and highlights the potential of this approach to provide new perspectives and insights to educational research issues, and, in this case, to the reduction of the development of educational rhetoric-reality gaps.