There are many approaches to teaching about globalization, commodity chains, and sustainability. Education for sustainable development demands teaching approaches that capture multidimensional and integrated aspects of environmental, social, economic, and political factors. In geography, additional aspects require attention, such as understanding how peoples’ everyday lives, living conditions, and business relations depend on contextual circumstances including place, time, and scales. This article presents a time-geographic teaching approach that enables systems thinking through contextual analysis.

We present a time-geographically inspired educational approach which was implemented at a Swedish university in a yearly course, from 2007 to 2015 (9 years in total). Next, we review 48 student exam papers regarding how students performed a time-geographic contextual analysis of commodity chains and sustainability. We found that the teaching approach encouraged multiple descriptions and reflections by students. It developed students’ abilities to apply geographic concepts and to identify complex relationships in time and space that define sustainability challenges and strategies. Students linked everyday life to global and local processes.

Visual representation is a powerful tool in education and for analyzing the complexity of people in societies in their natural and built environments. This presentation reflects on time-geography in education and research about socio-environmental relationships and its potential in Education for Sustainable Development, ESD. It is exemplified by how time geography can be applied to reflect on the sustainable development goals in time-space contexts. The presentation is part of a study which explores how approaches in geography and environmental science focus on the relationships of humans to our environment in teacher education in Environmental Education in South Africa and Human Geography in Sweden. In this study, we argue the necessity for models and world views that provide educators and learners with tools to do complex analysis of agency in socio-environmental contexts in a structured and constructive manner. Two approaches to modelling socio-ecological relationships in time and space to be used in environmental and geography teacher education are discussed. These two models are rooted in critical realism and time-geography respectively. We identify and compare inherent concepts, tools and powers of the two models which can enrich teaching strategies for social and environmental education/learning. Central concepts in both models which are explored regarding synergies and complementarity are biographies, time-space relationships, and agency in relation to socio-environmental contexts. In addition, each model provides central concepts that make this analysis and teaching approach more complete.

It is deeply ironic that the social movement perspective has so far scarcely been utilised to analyse local protests against establishments of human service enterprises, as the perspective was originally formulated in just such a context. The social movement approach could inject new vitality into a field of research that has become increasingly marginalised and enable human geographers and other social scientists to reconnect to the key issues of socio-spatial exclusion that were raised 30–40 years ago, but now with theoretically informed perspectives. At the same time, social movement research has much to gain from returning to the study of protest movements opposing the establishment of human service enterprises: they are local and thus typical of most social movements, and their success or failure, which lacks the ambiguity so often noted in social movement research, can be studied from a lifecycle perspective.

Current research on local siting conflicts are primarily about environmental threats. Following a boom during the two last decades of the 1900s, research on community opposition to the establishment of human services is a shrinking field with inadequate articulation and comparisons of various approaches. The aim of this research review is to critically scrutinize the first wave of research on local protests against human services and expose and contrast later approaches in order to lay the necessary groundwork for synthesis attempts. The first wave approach is characterized by its far-reaching generalization claims; all local protests against perceived social threats were seen as instances of Not In My Back Yard protests and as a function of general, hierarchically arranged attitudes toward client groups. By contrast, in later attempts to shed light upon neighbourhood protests, real life protests against the establishment of human services – not general attitudinal data – are focused upon. But the degree of contextualizing varies greatly within this more protest-centred research. The indirect approach is based on data that are collected in interviews with human service administrators and concern the extent and duration of neighbors’ protests, while in the direct approach the protests are studied as such, and especially issues having to do with the local protests’ ability to generate public support. In this article, the alternatives to the first wave of research on siting conflicts have been demonstrated for the first time and contrasted with each other. This is a necessary requirement and a first step for efforts to provide the syntheses that this research area so sorely needs.

There are many approaches in teaching about globalization and commodity chains. Depending on the points you want to make, you may identify either environmental, social, economic or political factors that come into play in the life path of a commodity. When referring to sustainability, we also should be able to capture the multidimensional and integrated aspects of these same factors. As geographers, additional aspects require attention, such as understanding how peoples’ everyday lives, living conditions, and business conditions are linked to context (places, resources, people, businesses, as well as social, economic and political structures at different geographical scales). For this reason, geography education, teachers, and students all require educational perspectives that include reasoning and tools to perform this kind of analysis. We argue that time geography has an inherent basic structure that enables such reasoning and contextual learning. Based on teaching experiences about globalization, sustainability and commodity chains with time geography as a frame of reference, we analyze 56 student exam papers regarding contextual learning. Particular interest is placed on how the students reflect on commodity chains and sustainability by identifying pockets of local order along the life path of commodity chains of multinational companies, as well as how individual’s’ everyday lives in different parts of the globe are connected through chains of relationships.

Att leva i en globaliserad värld med hållbar utveckling som övergripande samhällsmål ställer krav på medborgares förmågor att greppa mångdimensionella samband. Det kan t. ex. vara att förstå hur handlingar i vardagslivet och levnadsvillkor i närmiljön är länkade till andra platser, andra människor och verksamheter samt andra samhällsstrukturer. Utbildningen av samhällsmedborgare måste inkludera resonemang och uppgifter som tränar oss i denna förmåga. Tidsgeografin har en inneboende grundstruktur som möjliggör sådana resonemang och kontextuellt lärande. Med utgångspunkt i erfarenheter av undervisning i tidsgeografi för geografistudenter och blivande geografilärare analyserar vi frågeställningar som beaktar denna utmaning och drar slutsatser om lärande för hållbar utveckling. Vi utgår från frågeställningar som studenterna arbetat med i examinationsuppgifter och resonerar om hur de tillämpat det tidsgeografiska perspektivet och analyserat faktorer bakom geografiskt utfall av multinationella företags produktionskedjor, hållbarhetsutmaningar och förändrings/påverkansfaktorer i vardagslivet och omvärlden.

There are many feminisms and there are many geographies. This is a presentation of a time-geographic teaching model which was used to present a diversity of feminisms and geographies in an upper level university course. The purpose was to provide a structured historical overview of how research on women and gender in general, and particularly with respect to geographic inquiry, has raised questions and focused on aspects of the physical environment and identity, and how the two are related to each other in time and space. Gender identities and gender roles are expressions of geographical context, biographic past and aspirations for the future. With this framework as a reference, students were asked to reflect on their everyday lives, identities and gender expressions in daily settings. With a time-geographic approach situated learning was encouraged both to understand self with respect to personal experiences and everyday contexts, and to see that gender inquiry necessarily is grounded in processes in time and space. Students’ reading responses are analyzed and illustrate how gender research approaches may be applied to reflect on personal biographies, geographic context, and identity.

Factors influencing teachers’ selection of content in geography teaching is a fundamental didactic matter. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Swedish geography teachers’ informal and formal experiences have influenced their interest in geography and if so, in what way. The results disclosed that informal experiences like outings, holidays, and childhood memories have a significant impact. The results also revealed that childhood experiences might increase the comprehension of how nature and mankind are connected, and how various places differ. Selective traditions showed to be strong, i.e. geographic names and map reading were prioritized while at excursions, physical geography was particularly dominating. We argue that in the geography teacher education, didactics should include methods for field studies, giving emphasis also to the part dealing with human geography. Forthcoming teachers need to reflect on how to make didactic choices in order to renounce the selective traditions in the subject.