Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026)
Special Issue: SI_TGEO

Engaging with the Wickedness of Education for Sustainable Development through Multimodal Vignettes in Teacher Education

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Elena Flucher
University of Graz, Austria
Pauline Hennig
Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Tom Wils
Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Nicole Raschke
Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Fabian Pettig
University of Graz, Austria
Vignette: Global Plastic Pollution
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.e.flu.17.2.338.345
Categories

Published 2026-07-23

Keywords

  • Wicked Problems,
  • Education for Sustainable Development,
  • Teacher Professionalisation,
  • Teacher Education,
  • Vignettes

How to Cite

Flucher, Elena, Pauline Hennig, Tom Wils, Nicole Raschke, and Fabian Pettig. 2026. “Engaging With the Wickedness of Education for Sustainable Development through Multimodal Vignettes in Teacher Education”. European Journal of Geography 17 (2):S.338-S.345. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.e.flu.17.2.338.345.

Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Flucher, Pauline Hennig, Tom Wils, Nicole Raschke; Fabian Pettig

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Received 2026-02-11
Accepted 2026-07-18
Published 2026-07-23

Abstract

This paper conceptualises Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as a Wicked Problem and highlights the need to explicitly address its inherent controversy in geography teacher education. To engage with the content-related, pedagogical, and structural dimensions of this Wickedness as they intersect in everyday classroom practices, we propose multimodal vignettes as a promising casuistic tool for reflection. Drawing on the international project INTERACT, the paper outlines the construction of these vignettes and illustrates the approach through one specific vignette. First experiences from using the vignette corpus in different seminar contexts suggest that multimodal vignettes may support a shift away from solution-orientated approaches towards more reflexive engagement with the complexity, uncertainty, and contested nature of sustainability-related teaching.

Highlights:

  • Wickedness of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as an analytical framework
  • Multimodal vignettes as a tool for reflexive professionalisation in teacher education
  • Supporting reflexive engagement with complexity, uncertainty, and controversy in ESD
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