Teacher Education for Sustainability

Teachers play an important role in promoting environmentally responsible citizenship. Teacher education in sustainability should be considered essential for introducing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in schools. However, for this education to be effective adequate training of pre-service and in-service teachers is needed. Higher education and other in-service training systems need to be reviewed to establish basic teacher’s competences in sustainability, as well as to analyze which pedagogic/didactic methodologies are the most appropriate to improve such competences.

Our Common Future, the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) states that "the world's teachers ... have a crucial role to play" in helping to bring about "the extensive social changes" needed along the pathway towards a sustainable future. For teachers to play this role successfully they require a commitment to the principles of education for sustainability; without it, they may lack the skills, insights and desire to ensure that their students are provided with opportunities to learn how to contribute to the ways their communities are working to advance the transition to sustainability. The purpose of this seminar is to suggest a rationale for ensuring that education for sustainability is embedded into the initial pre-service and continuing in-service education of teachers. This rationale is supported by principles developed from the experience of two teacher education projects in the Asia-Pacific region, Teaching for a Sustainable World (Fien, 1993, 1995) and Learning for a Sustainable Environment (Fien, Heck and Ferreira, 1997). Two general points-or caveats-need to be made at the start, however. Firstly, the literature on education for sustainability is relatively new and there has been very little explicitly written on teacher education for sustainability. Thus, it is necessary to draw on literature from the closely related field of environmental education. Secondly, much of this literature is dated and normative, i.e., it is often one or two decades old, and tends to focus on what we ought to do rather than build theory and principles upon accounts drawn from empirical research. A major reason for this may be the long-running situation in which very few teacher education courses have sought to ensure that education for sustainability and/or environmental education are embedded in the professional development experiences of teachers.

This seminar slated for the month of November 2020    will focus on studies evaluating and analyzing the relationship between ESD and teacher training. Authors from different disciplines, such as education, psychology, social sciences and other disciplines related to sustainable development issue are invited to submit their papers at [email protected] not later than August 31, 2020. Theoretical and applied research articles are welcome. Submissions for the seminar could relate, but are not limited, to the following topics:

? Teacher training and ESD

? Pre-service and in-service teacher education and ESD

? Teacher Education Curriculum and ESD

? Teacher evaluation and ESD

? Teacher competencies in ESD

? Policies for teacher training in ESD

? Innovation of higher education institutions for teacher training in ESDTeacher Education for Sustainability