A transactional model of moral learning – how to challenge unsustainable denials

Abstract This article draws on a philosophical critique of the problems of denial in the face of the climate crisis and the call for an education that deals with the root causes of social and environmental injustice in depth. To respond to this radical critique in concrete educational practice, there is a need for an understanding of moral learning that also considers the problems of denial and the role of the teacher in these learning processes. We therefore propose a transactional model grounded in Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy that explains how denial hinders the process of moral learning but also describes how teachers can offer moments of resistance that interrupt denial and challenges and transform moral habits. Finally, we discuss the implications of a transactional perspective and the need for making moral progress by reflectively revising our moral habits in the face of overlapping environmental and social injustice crises.


Introduction
The United Nations Environment Programme's Adaptation Gap Report in 2022 (UNEP, 2022) shows that for two centuries modernity has followed an increasingly fossil-dependent evolutionary path.The report also emphasises that human-induced climate change is causing widespread disruption in nature, and that the people who are least responsible for climate change are being hardest hit.The report states that despite these aspects, adaptation support for developing countries is up to ten times below the estimated needs and that the gap continues to widen.As we try to educate for the future, and while today's youth protest at the inadequate action being taken to address climate change, the ongoing crisis and that Western fossil-based modernity is relationally unethical and ecologically unsustainable, it becomes evident that we do not need more education but different education.
Based on a diagnosis of the present human condition, leading educational philosophers call for a profound and radical shift in education in order to interrupt the everyday denials that limit our capacity to respond generatively to the ecological and human crisis.These denials are mainly ethical in character, in that they concern an unrelenting and unsustainable exploitation of both nature and human beings.Stein et al. (2022) and Andreotti (2021a) explain that as these denials are rooted in ethics, rather than ignorance, they require something different than what is offered in mainstream education today.Andreotti (2021aAndreotti ( , 2021b) ) and Todd (2021) argue that what we need is an education that addresses these denials and deals with the root causes of societal and environmental problems in greater depth.Biesta suggests (2006Biesta suggests ( , 2012aBiesta suggests ( , 2019aBiesta suggests ( , 2020) ) that teaching should bring something that offers resistance in the sense of a pedagogy of interruption that limits the desires that (modern) society projects onto education.
in order to respond to radical philosophical critiques in concrete educational practice, we need an understanding of moral learning that also considers the problems of denial and the role of the teacher in these learning processes.What we call for is an understanding that can explain how education in practice can relate to the demands to offer resistance, challenge denial and transform students' moral habits, beliefs and mindsets.
The purpose of this article is thus to suggest a theoretical model of moral learning that we believe can be a useful tool in the development of an educational practice for ethical transformation.We draw specifically on John Dewey's account of the importance of engaging moments of resistance and discuss what involving elements of indeterminacy and inconsistency can offer in educational practice and value education.Building on earlier work (Sund andÖhman 2014, 2022), we deepen Dewey's transactional perspective on morality as always being situated at the interface of person and context.This transactional perspective means that individuals and the environment are seen as constantly co-evolving.consequently, morality continuously evolves as we are exposed to situations of insecurity and conflict that force us to reflect on our choices and the consequences of our actions.We are therefore not offering a manual or an interpretive lens for teachers' systematic planning and reflective teaching when engaging in value education and complex issues, but rather a theoretical model that explains the ethical and moral dimensions of teaching and learning practices.To capture the specifics of moral learning we present a transactional model that combines Dewey's moral theory (Dewey [1922(Dewey [ ] 1988(Dewey [ , [1932(Dewey [ ] 1985) ) and theory of learning (Dewey [1916(Dewey [ ] 1980(Dewey [ , [1938(Dewey [ ] 1997)).The model explains the process through which habits are interrupted by doubt and become the object of inquiry.With Dewey, we also stress the importance of teachers engaging moments of resistance in students' experiences in order to confront a morally problematic situation such as the climate crisis.
in this article we begin by offering a synthesis of radical philosophical critiques and then review their diagnosis of denial as a response to climate change.We also consider the implications of this diagnosis for education, specifically mainstream education, and consider the importance of resistance and interruptions in students' experiences that arise in encounters with the unexpected.Then, we offer a transactional model for understanding the process of moral learning and the role of teaching in this process.Finally, we discuss the possible implications of a transactional perspective and the need to make moral progress by reflectively revising our moral habits in the face of numerous overlapping environmental and social injustice crises.

Philosophical critique of modern education
in this section we outline the problems of denial in the face of the climate crisis and the consequences of how we think about education and pedagogy.The review is informed by critical educational analysis, which highlights the existential stakes of the ways we relate to the climate crisis and that we need to work through our denials and face the enormity of the crisis and how we are complicit in it (Andreotti 2021a(Andreotti , 2021b;;Todd 2021).We also emphasise that central to the task of education is the interruption of ways in which students consider themselves as the centre of the world and the opening up of possibilities for responsible relations with others and the natural world (Biesta 2006(Biesta , 2019b(Biesta , 2020)).Furthermore, for an education that is focused on a broader frame of reference and includes existential questions of ecology and a political orientation, the encounter with resistance is both an important dimension of what education is about and a tool for survival in the 21st century context (Biesta 2017(Biesta , 2019a;;2022;Biesta and Matthes 2018).

Education and the problems of denial
The reality and the seriousness of climate change have been well known in climate science and environmental science for decades. in 1995, the intergovernmental Panel on climate change (iPcc) concluded that 'the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate' (22).Since the 1980s, the well-coordinated and well-funded 'denial machine' (Begley 2007) continues to play a crucial role in generating scepticism and casting doubt on climate change amongst policymakers and the general public (Dunlap and Mccright 2011;Dunlap 2013).Sociologist Norgaard (2011) describes denial and the condition of failing to respond to climate change as a social process that hinders the ability to take action and responsibility, despite the obvious signs of extreme weather events.Drawing on Norgaard's description, Zimmerman (2020) suggests that this condition contributes to a normalisation of the climate crisis that is rooted in the logics of capitalist modernity and known as 'normalised denialism' (82) (see also Bryan 2022).
Denial in relation to education has also attracted a growing amount of attention in the educational sciences.Already in The Culture of Denial (1997), chet Bowers discusses critical alternatives to mainstream discourses on education that respond and relate to the ecological crisis and point to links between Western modernity and its ideas and values, such as consumerism, commercialism and environmental degradation.Lysgaard (2019) describes denial in relation to education as a (defensive) reaction pattern and a way of dealing with emotional disturbances triggered by the unsettling implications of climate change.he argues that instead of denying the challenges we face, we should acknowledge that education is entwined with insight and denial and that these notions are fruitful for constructively and reflexively engaging with the complexity of sustainability issues in an educational context.More recently, educational philosophers have drawn attention to how formal educational settings have been complicit in the reproduction of unsustainability and historical and structural violence.Andreotti (2021a, b) calls for an education that not only interrupts the denials of the sustainability emergency but also addresses 'the relationship between unsustainability and historical, systemic and on-going violence' (3).Andreotti (2021aAndreotti ( , 2021b) ) argues that the task of education at times of intensified multiple crises is to educate in order to interrupt the four socially sanctioned denials that are rooted in conditions created by colonialism, namely the denial of 1) systemic violence (exploitation, expropriation), 2) ecological unsustainability, 3) the condition of entanglement/relationality and 4) the extent and depth of the multiple problems faced by humanity (2; cf.Stein et al. 2022).Andreotti (2021a) suggests 'depth education' as a kind of psychoanalytic education that addresses denial and has the potential to bring 'problematic aspects of our individual and collective unconscious' (5) to the surface.Stein et al. (2022) and Andreotti (2021a) explain that as these problems are rooted in denial (rather than ignorance or immorality) they require a different educational response than that offered by mainstream education.As described by Machado de oliveira (2021), we need to work through these denials and realise that contemporary, global, modern lifestyles reward the upholding of them.her diagnosis of the present is that modernity, which has brought profound change to the human condition at the same time as causing unimaginable suffering and destruction, is now dying and in need of 'hospicing': 'because hospicing involves modernity dying within and around us, this can be a difficult, painful, disorienting, and destabilizing process, which may or may not be what you need in your life right now (or at all)' (30).
in a response to the denials that Andreotti (2021a) speaks about, Todd (2021) describes the subtle ways in which denial can affect us.She draws attention to the fact that the ways in which we live our lives in the global North are full of compromise caused by our unsustainable consumption habits.Both scholars agree that the present and ongoing sustainability challenges require the very terms of education to be reinvented, since mainstream education seems to reproduce these denials.As noted by Todd (2021), 'simply educating for a system that is so out of joint with the consequences of environmental violence indeed is educating for denial -and irrelevance' (161).

Education and responsibility
At a more general level, Biesta (2019b), and more recently osberg and Biesta (2021), have problematised the question of the educational task and argued that the purpose of education as a kind of instrument for solving societal problems has received too much attention.in his critique of instrumentalist tendencies in education, Biesta (2011Biesta ( , 2012b) ) points out that an education that aims to produce a particular kind of individual or equip children and young people with certain useful competencies and skills misses that children and students are moral subjects, that is 'subjects of action and responsibility, not objects of intervention and influence' (Biesta 2012b, 39).Taking on responsibility, as described by Biesta (2012bBiesta ( , 2013bBiesta ( , 2019b)), captures an individual in a responsible relation with others and with the natural world to realise their unique 'singular existence in that particular moment' (Biesta 2019a, 157).Thus, responsibility is something that we encounter (Biesta 2020) and choose (or not) to shoulder.School is the place where this can happen.
The instrumental use of education includes the significant attention to education in and through international and supranational organisations such as UNESco and their positioning of education as a panacea to end the global concerns of poverty and climate change.osberg and Biesta (2021) find this pursuit problematic, in that it cannot 'do justice to the complexity of human togetherness under conditions of globalization' (58).The conclusion that can be drawn from this line of reasoning is that in globalised societies that are faced with different ethical and political issues education has failed to compensate for structural inequalities and unsustainable lifestyles.This critique requires that we attend to the question of what kind of education we might need, or rather how the school should respond to the realities of contemporary society (Biesta 2013b(Biesta , 2019a) and a deeply unequal and unsustainable world.Biesta (2019a) suggests that education should not simply be a function of modern societies but also needs to be dysfunctional in relation to society, because it has a duty to interrupt, limit and resist the desires that society projects onto it.Drawing on French educationalist Philippe Meirieu, Biesta (2019a) argues for a more 'obstinate' school, in that 'education should never just move smoothly and flexibly with what is wanted from it -by society, by parents, and by students themselves -but always needs a degree of obstinacy' (2).Thus, Biesta makes a case for resistance as an important dimension of education (2012a, 2019a, 2020;Biesta and Matthes 2018).

The potential of resistance in education
Discussing responsible educational responses to modern societies, Biesta (2013b) questions the emphasis on skills-based approaches based on the acquisition of knowledge.Skills-based and competency-based education approaches rest on the idea that we can predict what is needed in the future.As we have discussed in previous work (Öhman and Sund 2021), there is a problem with skills and competencies as educational concepts because they assume that what is judged to be the keys to success today will be context-independent and stable.Biesta (2013b) argues that approaches that uncritically embrace ever-expanding, global capitalism and take the global competitive economy as their unquestioned frame of reference seem to rest on an uncritical acceptance of the reality of contemporary society. in the long run, if we see the task of education as preparing children and young people for this reality, such approaches will hide the political dimension and the power structures through which they operate.A responsible (educative) response is therefore one that takes a more critical stance to the demands of such a society and asks how our personal desires (preferences, values) interfere with those of others.
The scholarly concern outlined above of a passive acceptance and sanctioned tolerance of practices that clearly have a damaging effect on humans and nature and prevent significant action on global warming and justice calls for a profound and radical shift in education.it calls for an education that questions taken-for-granted moral beliefs, habitual ways of being and making sense of the world.We believe that a transactional perspective can help to explain how education in practice can offer a resistance that interrupts denial and challenges and transforms moral habits.

A transactional model of moral learning
in this section we suggest a model of moral learning that combines Dewey's moral theory and theory of learning (see also Sund and Öhman 2022;Östman and Öhman 2022;van Poeck, Östman, and Öhman 2019). 1 We elaborate on the concept of resistance as an educational response to denial and relate to the teaching and learning process.if we seek to address the idea of teaching in (formal) educational settings and want to apply critical perspectives to sustainability challenges and engage moments of resistance in educational practice, we need to approach this from a theory that describes and frames moral learning and illuminates how resistance fuels the development of (alternative) ideas and views and enables us to revise our attitudes, values and beliefs (and reach a conclusion).
Below, we present the model and its steps and apply it to a learning situation to highlight the essential role played by the teacher in the teaching and learning process.First, we discuss the pragmatic concepts of ethics, inquiry, experience, surroundings/environment and habits central to the model.

Ethics as an open-ended process of inquiry
According to Dewey ([1922Dewey ([ ] 1988)), ethics is an open-ended process in which people define and redefine their moral rules for individual and social conduct with the potential to expose challenges, adjust to problems and generate new possibilities.Dewey ([1922] 1988) sees ethics as existing in and through our actions, as interconnected with everyday life and as always situated in the interface of person and context (cf.Pappas 2008).Seen this way, ethics is not about codes, or codified behaviour, but is rather about enacting new and multiple ways and perspectives.Making ethics an everyday activity and a process of inquiry does not mean that decisions and actions are never taken, or that we are paralysed by perpetual doubt and/or relativism.What it does mean is that moral habits and ethical positions are open for discussion and revision when facing a specific situation.Dewey subscribes to a situational, contextual and consequential ethics and points out that 'reflective morality demands observation of particular situations, rather than fixed adherence to a priori principles' (Dewey [1932(Dewey [ ] 1985, 329), 329).Moreover, Dewey ([1929Dewey ([ ] 1958) ) argues that there are no fixed values for all times: 'values are as unstable as the forms of clouds' (399).Principles and values are tested by experience through an open-ended experimental process of inquiry, which means that they can be critically assessed and become 'more enduring and extensive values' (403).Therefore, experience and inquiry should influence morality, which can evolve as we are continually exposed to situations of insecurity and conflict in which we are forced to reflect on our choices.Morality is thus a matter of learning.
in developing the transactional model of moral learning, Dewey's notion of experience as indispensable to all learning is essential ([1934] 1980, [1938] 1997).Philosophically, we can in our minds and conversations with others explore new possibilities -although our beliefs, theories and moral judgements must also be related to the experiences that generated them and to those that they lead us to (cf.Dewey [1929] 1958, chapter 1). it is through the process of experience that we learn to navigate our course practically, emotionally and intellectually, both as individuals and as a pluralistic society.Thus, inquiry is part of experience, or rather, experience arises from and is funded by foregoing inquiries that deepen and broaden an engagement and interaction with the world that is experienced.As Dewey ([1934] 1980) sees it, 'Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living.Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges' (35).

Surroundings and environment
Not everything in our (natural, social and cultural) surroundings influences us or requires a response.Dewey (1916Dewey ( ] 1980) distinguishes an environment from what he calls surroundings: 'the things with which a person "varies" are her or his "genuine environment"' (15).Dewey clarifies that 'the specific continuity of the surroundings' becomes the environment, and that 'the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being' (ibid.).or, perhaps, that which affects a person becomes the environment.The key to understanding what Dewey refers to as the 'genuine environment' is the process of 'transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment' (Dewey, [1938(Dewey, [ ] 1997, 43), 43). in our model, the arrow shows the process of environing where surroundings become the environment (Östman and Öhman 2022;Sund and Öhman 2022;Andersson, Garrison, and Östman 2018).
From a transactional viewpoint, we are shaped in transaction with the environment and by the environing conditions (Dewey, [1938(Dewey, [ ] 1997)).As there are different ethical positions and concerns to the issue of moral responsibility in the climate change discourse, it is important to distinguish who or what should be respected as moral objects and what constitutes our moral environment.For example, climate change raises questions about the moral value of humans (such as whether we have moral obligations vis-à-vis past and future generations, geographically, those emotionally and mentally close to us) and the appropriate relationship between humans and the rest of nature (including nonhuman animals) (cf.Kronlid and Öhman 2013).A climate-changed world has direct and worrying implications for gender, racial and global justice, because those who are least responsible for causing climate change are the most affected by its effects and consequences (Pashby and Sund 2020;Sund and Pashby 2020).intricate questions about who should deal with common yet differentiated responsibilities for the future of the globe have ethical and political global implications for today's classrooms.Who has moral responsibility for climate change?Who is to blame for climate change and who has the duty to do something about it?in relation to classroom contexts, how can teachers enable and handle pedagogical approaches that take up rather than gloss over these complexities?The model suggests that the teacher distinguishes the educative environment and educative moments from the surroundings and ensures a learning situation that is productive for the student and enables a critical open reflection process.

Habits
What we learn in and through experience are habits and they can accordingly be seen as the unit of learning (Östman and Öhman 2022). in Dewey's sense, habit has a deeper and wider meaning than the conventional idea of a more or less fixed pattern for our actions, in that 'it covers the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living' (Dewey, [1938(Dewey, [ ] 1997, 35), 35).our habits thus form our characters and mindsets -we are our habits.our aggregated habits are flexible resources that help us to deal with different situations in life and filter the material that reaches our thoughts.Dewey writes ([1922] 1988) that this filter is not 'chemically pure' , but 'is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is received' (32).Thus, habits filter and control action (thinking, feeling) and give meaning and continuity to new actions.The habits we apply in situations that actualise questions of care, responsibility, rights etcetera constitute our moral habits and are basically the same as our moral beliefs.
From the moment we are born our habits are created, confirmed, challenged and refined in and through the encounters with our environment that take place in different activities. in this way, the world is part of us from the beginning and therefore there is no independent mind that needs to seek contact with the outer world.our morals are not private possessions but are habits that 'involve the support of environing conditions' (that is, society, human activity etc.) and are 'personal capacities with environing forces' (Dewey [1922(Dewey [ ] 1988, 16-17), 16-17).As explained by Pedersen and Dunne (2020), habits are ways that make us familiar with our environment, navigates in it and anticipates its fluctuations.As described by Garrison (2002), habits are the very dispositions through which 'humans functionally inhabit our world' (125).They are social tools and determine 'how people engage and transform the world for their purposes' (11).This transactional process can be pictured as functionality or perhaps better ways of moving through the world: 'the environment moves through individuals via habits and individuals move through their environment via habits' (Pedersen and Dunne 2020, 251).

Framing teaching and the moral learning process
The model of moral learning (Figure 1) describes steps in the process of moral learning and the role of teaching in this process.Moral learning is here defined as learning driven by experiencing moral situations that make students reflect on responsibilities and concerns and explore and engage with complexities and contractions within and between perspectives (Kronlid and Öhman 2013; van Poeck, and Öhman 2019).accordance with Dewey's pragmatic perspective, we see moral situations as those in which students can choose alternative ways of acting, and where this choice contains elements of uncertainty and conflict regarding the consequences for other humans, non-humans and environmental systems in various situations in life (Sund and Öhman 2014).
We have earlier argued (Öhman and Sund 2021) that, from a pragmatic perspective, students learn to (practically, emotionally, and intellectually) navigate through the process of experience and to open up for and take in the world and its differences.Every experience modifies us and, in a sense, the world.When students live through a learning experience they are not only actors in the world but are also receptive to and undergo the world, and thus need to be able to question and change previous ways of acting, feeling and thinking, i.e. their habits.in that sense, we always exist and act 'in and with the world' as Biesta (2020) puts it drawing on the discussion of this in Freire (1970Freire ( /2000)).Teachers play an essential role in calling students to attend to the world in educational situations and settings, in their development of a critical understanding of sustainability issues and, ultimately, in their awareness and interest in living in a sustainable and ethically sensible way.The role of the teacher is to support the development of a deep engagement anchored in scientific knowledge through a critical inquiry into different alternatives.This also calls for educational situations in which teachers apply critical reflexivity in their practices.in other words, teachers engage with students in order to understand what matters to them and their future and what challenges them to address the current context of social and economic inequality and environmental destruction, so that they are more able to understand how they are part of the problems and part of the solutions.

A transactional model of moral learning
Dewey's theory of reflective learning emphasises that teaching that challenges and interrupts the smooth path of habitual modes of thinking and action can be seen as the point at which education begins (English 2009(English , 2016;;Biesta 2012b).Entering this experience marks the beginning of a process of moral learning in the classroom and an opportunity for students to take in something new that can (but not necessarily will) transform their thinking and modes of acting.
The model (Figure 1) highlights the importance of engaging moments of resistance in teaching and illustrates how habits are shaped in transaction with our moral environment.A crucial first step of moral learning is the environing process, where we choose what to include in our moral environment (as shown by the arrow in Figure 1). it is in relation to this moral environment that students face different moral situations.The learning process and its mutually dependent steps (in brackets) that potentially take place in these situations are illustrated in the figure and explained as follows.habits (1) inform patterns of thought and actions and are the tools that guide students to define problems.Faced with a moral situation, students need to relate actions and consequences to their earlier experiences.When students are challenged in an educational situation and, for example, have to choose between short-term self-interest and long-term collective interest, they confront resistance, which brings a state of doubt (2) and opens up to questioning previous moral habits.Dewey describes how we begin to doubt our moral habits because we feel that something is not right and we find ourselves in 'an indeterminate situation' (Dewey, [1938(Dewey, [ ] 1986, 109), 109).Doubt can spark the drive to resolve problems and initiate a moral inquiry (3). in line with Dewey, Lekan (2003) describes how the inquiry starts with a key/direct experience, 'a relation between a person, a representation, and a problematic situation' that prompts us to reflect on and recontextualise habits, and that 'there is an indeterminate situation, including a felt sense of trouble due to a failure of habits' (37).inquiry is literally something do and means experimenting with possibilities by questioning the taken-for-granted testing principles and values.The process of inquiry provides students with an opportunity to reach a reflective solution (4).A reflective solution is here seen as a moral solution that has undergone an inquiry in which attitudes, values and beliefs (moral habits) have been tested against the students' moral environment.The reflective solution is the outcome of an acceptable way of acting in relation to the moral objects of the environment.Meaning and essence of the solution emerge as a consequence of this transactional process.Students' moral judgements and actions are revised in the light of (new) problems and circumstances and the consequences of acting on them.They become revised beliefs/habits (5).Dewey refers to the role of continuity of experience in determining the value of an experience and argues that 'the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after' (Dewey [1938(Dewey [ ] 1997, 35), 35).Accordingly, students make moral progress and deepen the quality of their moral actions by revising their habits (value judgments, actions).As students' morality is revised and adapts to changes in the moral environment/surrounding world, they can develop new ways of dealing with unprecedented challenges such as climate change

The educational problem of denial
We see the educational problem of denial in two ways.on the one hand, if people in geographically distant areas/the global South are not seen as part of students' moral environment, then their habits relating to global justice will neither be questioned nor be part of an environing process.on the other hand, even if students see issues of global justice and obligations to strangers as part of the moral environment but will not allow them to interrupt their moral habits, this will still hinder the learning process.Understanding resistance as a source of individual learning and moral development can potentially challenge denials that limit our capacity to respond to the climate crisis and provoke individual and collective change efforts. in this transformative process, teaching is more important than ever.
The model illuminates what becomes problematic with denial from an educational perspective.The starting point of a moral learning process is always our habits in concrete practice and an encounter with the world that makes us doubt, question and start experimenting to find new ways of thinking in a step-by-step process -to make room for something unexpected.if students deny, no resistance arises and there is thus no inquiry process in which they can revise their habits.

Setting the scene for a challenging learning environment
So, what can teachers that want to address denial do? in relation to the suggested moral learning model, the task of the teacher is to set the scene for a learning environment and influence students through the intermediary of the environing conditions.The teacher can support and facilitate an inquiry process by clarifying and directing students to essential moral issues in their learning environment and provide the resistance that challenges their denials e.g. by questioning arguments, moral principles or lack of responsibility, interrupting their moral habits and supporting critical reflection.An interruption can be actively enacted by confronting the students with ethical problems and dilemmas or different critical theoretical perspectives and by providing spaces for these conversations.
Dewey ([1916] 1980) holds that we never educate directly but indirectly by means of the environment, and he regards any environment as a 'chance environment' if we see its educative potential (23).Dewey ([1938Dewey ([ 1997) explains a primary responsibility of teachers as: not only be aware the general principle the shaping of actual experience environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth.Above all, they should know how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worth while.(40) Nevertheless, and as exemplified and supported by empirical examples (see Pashby and Sund 2020;Sund and Pashby 2020), teachers can unintentionally get caught up in consolidating uncomplicated analyses, rather than challenging an unjust and unsustainable societal transformation.in a previous study in which we examined how upper secondary teachers take up sustainability issues in the classrooms, there was an example of a science teacher raising the issue of the growing electronic waste problem by referring to a quotation from Greenpeace in the textbook being used.The quote presented the problem of electronic waste whereby the burden of the toxicity of waste from the global North is mainly borne by developing countries.The teacher engaged students in an ethical discussion and invited them to reflect on why the handling and recycling of e-waste was not being done in the global North and the question of responsibility related to that ('Why does it not end up here?' , 'how come we don't take care of this?').From a transactional perspective, and for the context of teaching about sustainability issues, we stress the importance of lifting ethical and political perspectives in a classroom discussion as a way of offering resistance, confronting students with enduring uneven social, political and economic relationships and inquiring into and contextualising sustainability issues as tied to patterns of power that have emerged as a result of colonialism.Moments like this in a classroom situation can have educational potential in terms of creating a critical reflexivity that challenges students' denials and interrupts (moral) habits.A crucial task for teachers would then be to deepen and explore educative experiences like this in order to produce growth and expand students' understanding and open them up to other opportunities and connections.or as Dewey notes, to 'prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality' ([1938] 1997, 47).
Resistance can thus be seen as the productive force of teaching by creating experiences of discontinuity or interruption in students' interactions with the world and as a starting point for reflective inquiry/thinking.But, as English (2013) notes, these experiences where we call into question our taken-for-granted ideas can only be productive if they lead to reflection on what we have previously regarded as true and on our relation to the world. in the model, the concept of doubt denotes a moment of discontinuity or interruption in experience that highlights the educative meaning in the learning process.initiating discontinuity in the students' learning environment is essential for the learning process because it not only points to the experience of doubt, but also to a struggle to move past these limits and acquire new knowledge (English 2013).For Dewey, reflection on the moments of interruption is a state of experiencing the unfamiliar and the new: 'after a period of interruption through conflict and need, it is also an enactment of a new state of affairs' (Dewey [1939(Dewey [ ] 1988, 234), 234).hence, the role of the teacher is to move students beyond the interruption in their experience by encouraging them to resolve the problem through inquiry.Biesta (2019b) describes how the teacher gives form to and provides time to work with this experience, and 'to "stage" the experience of resistance as important, meaningful and positive and have an eye for the many different subtle ways in which this can be done' (60).Biesta (2012b) also advises the teacher to work with 'resistant materials' from the material world and the social world, and in particular help the student to endure the frustration (of existing in and with the world) and 'to stay "with" that which resists and to work "through" it rather than against it' (44).Biesta (2013c) argues that teaching only has meaning if it comes from the outside, when it adds rather than just confirms and contributes something radically new: 'an interruption that really interrupts always arrives unexpected ' (456).This is echoed by Andreotti (2021a), who points to the need for teaching 'to make room for something unexpected' that moves us in unforeseeable ways (6).When a teacher confronts students with something that is difficult or strange, it information about consumer patterns their real environmental and social costs and impact, or engaging with the historical legacy of colonialism and structural racism, there are those who refuse to engage with it or withdraw from it and those who are open to and let it in.The educational significance of engaging with resistant materials is to establish a process in which what is at risk for all the interacting parties can appear and where a practice that is truly relational and transactional can take root.
it goes without saying that the teacher cannot simply challenge students and leave them uncertain, lost or frustrated.The teacher needs to guide them in their inquiry processes of creating new habits.'Taking in' an experience is more than placing something on the top of what was previously known and 'involves reconstruction which may be painful' (Dewey [1934(Dewey [ ] 1980, 41), 41).Even if Biesta (2019a) argues for an education that should also be dysfunctional in relation to society, it does not mean that the student should be dysfunctional.The teacher supports the student to move forward to an ending, at least temporarily, so that the particular experience can come to a close: 'Maturation and fixation are polar opposites.Struggle and conflict may be themselves enjoyed, although they are painful, when they are experienced as means of developing an experience' (Dewey [1934(Dewey [ ] 1980, 41), 41).As has been discussed and as the empirical example above suggests, organising/structuring students' inquiries into sustainability issues in a way that develops an educational practice for ethical (sustainable and societal) transformation and enables moral learning means that teachers support students to clarify problems, emotionally grapple with them and take them into their moral environment.Furthermore, it involves teachers introducing students to ethical theory and language/ethically and theoretically anchored language and concepts to reflect with and that help them to try out and reflect on possible solutions and different options in order to revise the ways in which we live our moral lives (Öhman and Kronlid 2019).

Discussion
in this article we stress the need for a theoretical understanding of moral learning that considers the problems of denial of unsustainable lifestyles and structural inequalities.We propose a transactional model grounded in Dewey's pragmatic philosophy that describes and frames the process of moral learning, the role of teaching and the importance of engaging moments of resistance in this process.We see the model as a concrete response to calls for a profound and radical shift in education.Recently UNESco (2021) has described this as a need for a new social contract for education.our ambition has been to take the philosophical critique of education to a theory of practice and suggest a theoretical tool for reflecting on teaching practices and ethical transformation.
Radical philosophical critiques point to the exploitation of land, people and climate injustice caused by inequalities and how the current climate crisis, comprehensible or not, is increasingly difficult to deny.Yet, as Bowers already discussed 25 years ago, denial seems to be a common response to climate change.here, we argue that we need to confront the unsettling implications of these critiques and their diagnosis for education and consider the importance of resistance and interruptions in students' experiences when they position themselves in relation to what they have learned and how they reflect on conflicting ideas about a just and sustainable society (cf.Öhman and Sund 2021).An education that creates opportunities for students to encounter resistance and work with and through resistant materials (Biesta, 2012) has the possibility to address and challenge denial, especially if we engage with critical modes of inquiry, critical perspectives and a scholarship of praxis (Sund and Pashby 2020).
calls for an education that goes into greater depth and engages the cognitive, affective and relational dimensions of learning are crucial when it comes to looking at conflicting and entangled human-nature relationships and our own complicities and denials in climate change.Andreotti provides a point of orientation for thinking about teaching and learning from a psychoanalytic perspective that invites us 'relate to the beyond knowledge, identity and (Andreotti 2021b).An important aspect of psychoanalytic theory is the unconscious mind, where the mental/mind is perceived as being separated from the (outer) world and language as something that is possible to separate from humans and their activities.A pragmatic understanding of experience is an alternative educational approach to facing existential questions and the conditions under which we continue to live life as though there was no tomorrow.Dewey relates knowing to action and emphasises the method of reflective inquiry in attaining knowledge.As Dewey ([1922] 1988) phrases it, people 'know with their habits, not with their "consciousness".The latter is eventual, not a source' (128).it is only through experience and the use of experience that we learn about the world.The model explains the inquiry process/ moral learning and highlights the importance of habitual modes of action and transformation of experience in moral learning.our habits are created in and through the environment we encounter.in this way, the outer world is part of us right from the start.There is no independent consciousness that needs to seek contact with the outer world.habits are functional in relation to the challenges we meet in our environment.Even habits that are unsustainable, exploitative and oppressive have once emerged as functional coordination.But what we now discover is that climate change itself offers resistance to our established patterns of living.Firstly, at a societal level as we cross planetary and socioeconomic boundaries.Secondly, at an individual level as we discover that the habits that constitute our everyday lives (consuming, using and disposing increased amounts of resources) are no longer functional or morally acceptable.For example, if we extend our moral consideration (to people far way, non-human animals, whole ecosystems) then we will find that what we do and think will not be sufficient to deal with the situation at hand and that we will meet resistance in experience.Andreotti (2021a) remarks on the problem we face as 'when the reproduction of cultural norms and ideals conflicts with the aim of securing human survival' (2).The value of moments of resistance thus has implications for moral learning, as teachers can create situations that evoke moral reactions that can be used as starting points for an ethical inquiry.Through the process of moral learning, students can reflect on (their) choices and the moral consequences of their actions.Seen in this way, climate change offers resistance that can support, rather than hinder, the ability to learn.
The model also relates to Biesta's (2012bBiesta's ( , 2019a) ) claim the students should be seen as 'subjects of action and responsibility' .Students have a critical ability to enter moral learning processes, although this also requires resistance and reflective inquiry.it is important to stress that the model describes the process of learning.What is also needed are discussions about the selection of content and methods when teaching sustainability issues.As sustainability issues are complex and conflictual, students need to investigate and reveal different perspectives on an issue and have an opportunity to reflect on and take a stand in their moral learning process.it should also be noted that moral learning does not occur in a vacuum.it is situated, relational and informed by a social context.Students' moral learning is impacted by complex and interrelated conditions such as teachers' initial education and training, socio-economic structures, and education policy.There are even corporate forces that have a direct negative impact on how schools engage with and respond to the global climate crisis.A striking example is the insidious role of fossil fuel corporations in promoting their interests in schools and other educational institutions, so called petro-pedagogy (Eaton and Day 2020;Tannock 2020;Andrée and hansson 2023).
A critical pluralistic approach that criticises consensus thinking and recognises substantiated arguments offered by other perspective are important pedagogical tools (Lindgren and Öhman 2019).Such an approach needs to consider plurality in relation to modernity, otherwise the conflicts that are encouraged may be limited to a debate within 'normalised denialism' , thus retaining a linear logic of progression that has already crossed several tipping points (over-consumption and environmental damage) (cf.Pashby, da costa, and Sund 2020).if education is to develop students' moral learning, teachers need to take the ethical implications of the consequences of sustainability issues into account in their teaching practices.This is part

Figure 1 .
Figure 1. a transactional model of moral learning.developed from sund and Öhman 2022 and adapted from ryan 2011.