Abstract:

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and set them as targets for political action. These SDGs make ecological literacy a central aspect of political education. Only a population that actively promotes the need for sustainability and the 17 defined goals will enable the SDGs to be achieved. At first glance, the 17 goals seem broader than just ecological. However, all the goals, including Well Being, Education, No Poverty, and No Hunger, rely on an ecologically sustainable approach to the world, which is explicitly called for, especially in Goals 2, 3, 6, and 7. Therefore, it is necessary to capture the ecological thinking of the younger generation to capture the didactic challenges of ecological literacy education.

The interview study presented here is a pilot study of the interdisciplinary project PoJoMeC, funded by The Federal Agency for Civic Education in Germany. It investigates children's understanding of politics at preschool and primary school ages. The theoretical background of this primarily didactic research is the ecological model of human development, according to Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979). In this context, we understand competence acquisition in Bronfenbrenner's sense as a process "emerging from the interaction of individual and context" (Rosa/Tudge, 2013, 244). Our research methods focus, on the one hand, on children's explicit knowledge and, on the other hand, already on concepts of rule-guided action (Marci-Boehncke et al., 2022).

On the one hand, the presented pilot study concretizes the survey of socio-ecological rule systems, which constitutes the political awareness of the students on the respective levels. On the other hand, this paper extends our concept in terms of argumentation theory by using a matrix from philosophy didactics. In our study, we interviewed eight students from upper primary school classes (grades 3 to 5) in the sense of a pretest. In our research design, we assume that this group of students reaches the meso- and macro-level in Bronfenbrenner's model. At the same time, and extending the original setting, we analyze the quality of the justifications students give for the validity of their rule assumptions at the micro, meso, and macro levels. In doing so, we draw on Frank Brosow's (2020) TRAP-mind theory. In his theory, Brosow distinguishes between four levels of justification for normative ideas, similar to the social rules of the ecological levels we examine. The theory aims to make intelligible what happens when, in the rational processing of problems, we name increasingly generalized reasons to make our preferences or judgments plausible. In practical analysis, the TRAP-Mind theory provides a matrix of rational reasoning. It differentiates four levels (thinking, reflecting, arguing, philosophizing) that determine how we engage with the topic of justified or justifiable normative rule beliefs. The TRAP-Mind-Matrix provides an instrument to capture the cognitive appropriation of social rules as the basis of an understanding of the political in general and ecological consciousness in particular.

Keywords:

Political thinking, ecological literacy, early education research, Ecological Theory of Human Development, TRAP-Mind-Theory.