Agency lens for sustainability related tasks in a German geography textbook and implications for task design in education for sustainable development

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to equip learners with the competencies necessary to act as informed and responsible agents of change. In highly interdisciplinary subjects such as geography education, textbooks play a key role in shaping how sustainability is represented and how students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes are fostered. However, there is a research gap in systematically analyzing sustainability-related tasks in geography textbooks with regard to agency. Thus, this study examines how agency is operationalized through task design in a representative German geography textbook. Drawing on an understanding of agency by Priestley et al. [30], three chapters were assessed using qualitative content analysis to identify how tasks afford cognitive, evaluative, and participatory engagement with sustainability-related issues. The study’s findings demonstrate that while sustainability is a recurring theme, tasks primarily individualize responsibility and rarely invite participatory or justice-oriented engagement. Even higher-order activities remain confined to personal reflection rather than collective or societal action. The study contributes to geography education and ESD research by illustrating how agency is shaped through task design and by highlighting the need for more dialogic and transformative task structures in future textbook development and classroom practice within ESD.