This study investigates the different arguments put forward by Swedish upper secondary students on the interconnectedness of the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development (SD). The aim is to study the diversity in views among students in order to find out whether this can be used as a resource in a holistic and pluralistic approach to ESD. The study design was based on a two-step process in which the first step was to identify students representing four different, broadly coherent, views on the interconnections between sustainability dimensions, with a specific focus on the role of the economy in SD. Thereafter, focus group interviews were undertaken with the selected groups of students representing the four different views. The findings indicate a diversity of arguments in discussions of SD and the potential that this plurality brings for perspective shifting. Moreover, the economic dimension appears as central to promoting discussions that aim to examine the overall interconnectedness of sustainability dimensions. A further conclusion is that omitting the economic dimension in ESD risks excluding the core of students’ ideas of how SD may be realized.
The sustainable development (SD) concept is based on the idea that economic and social development should be linked to the environment. However, controversies about various associated issues often arise due to the differences in protagonistsâ viewpoints, depending partly on whether they focus mainly on environmental, economic, or social dimensions and partly on ideological stances related (for instance) to the optimal ways of promoting economic growth and social justice. This study investigates views of 638 Swedish upper secondary students who responded to a questionnaire probing their views of SD from two perspectives. In the first, the dimensions were separately introduced, so the respondents only had to consider one dimension at a time. In the second, the dimensions were introduced in an integrated fashion, so the respondents had to consider effects related to all three dimensions. The results strongly indicate that the studentsâ views and priorities concerning the dimensions depend on both the perspective and the context. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed.
This longitudinal quantitative study investigated teachers' development of self-efficacy and teaching practices relating to education for sustainable development (ESD) in four compulsory schools in a Swedish municipality. The teachers participated in a professional development program over three school years designed to support them in implementing ESD. The program was based on five seminars that supported teachers to discuss and experiment with the principles, complexities and challenges of ESD. Data was collected at five different time points strategically planned at key moments in the program, using a questionnaire including scales measuring teachers' self-efficacy for ESD and their self-reported ESD practices. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to follow the teachers evolution across a time span of about three years. Results show that the teachers' self-efficacy was boosted early in the program, but fell back to initial levels after confrontation with practice. Through further experimentation in practice, the teachers' self-efficacy increased back to the initial level toward the end of the program. Furthermore, teachers started self-reporting ESD practices as the program progressed, and the correlation between self-efficacy for ESD and ESD practices grew. These results highlight the importance of providing teachers with long-term opportunities for bringing ESD into their own educational practice. The results also caution against using self-efficacy as an outcome measure in short-term professionalization initiatives.
This article describe the results of a nationwide questionnaire study of 3229 Swedish upper secondary school teachers’ understanding of sustainable development in relation to their subject discipline and teaching experience. Previous research has shown that teachers have difficulties understanding the complex concept of sustainable development. According to the Swedish curriculum all teachers in all subjects should integrate a holistic perspective of sustainable development including economic, ecological and social dimensions. This study shows that teachers differ in their understanding of the concept mostly according to their subject traditions. Social science teachers emphasize social dimensions, and science teachers’ ecological dimensions, respectively. Teachers are aware of the relevance of the three dimensions to various degrees, but do not generally have a holistic understanding. The greatest uncertainty in teachers’ understanding is related to the economic dimension. Science and social science teachers are critical of incorporating economic growth into the concept of sustainable development while language, vocational and esthetical-practical teachers are not. No experience-bound differences of the teachers’ understanding could be found, but recently qualified teachers consider their understanding of sustainable development to be poorer in comparison to more experienced teachers’ self-evaluation. The study highlights the need for further training in sustainable development since more than 70 % of the questioned teachers stated that they need such training.
This study explored the function of school leading in the implementation process of education for sustainable development (ESD) in five Swedish schools employing a whole school approach (WSA). A follow-up study design was used, in which schools that had initiated an ESD project in 2016 were subsequently visited twice for interviews with principals during the project and after it was finalized. The theory of practice architectures in combination with the concept of school improvement capacity was used as the theoretical framework in the analysis. The study showed how school leading should be about enhancing the local school’s capacity to improve. It also showed how specific practice architectures prefigured a WSA to ESD and how school leading in this context was about arranging—or orchestrating—practice architectures in ways that enabled such an approach. The issues of time and endurance were pivotal.Based on the empirical results from this study and school improvement theory, guidelines were developed that can be used to drive a WSA to ESD process forward through three different school improvement phases: initiation, implementation, and institutionalization. The limitations and suggestions for further research are also discussed.
The present study explores how school improvement in combination with a teacher professional development (TPD) project influenced the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) in five Swedish schools, when employing a whole school approach. Interviews were conducted with three teachers from each school. Shulman and Shulman's four forms of capital for capacity building were used as a framework for the data analysis. The impact of the project on the schools' pedagogical activities varied considerably between the schools. The transformative potential in ESD was realized to a greater extent in the schools characterized by high levels of moral capital - i.e. trust - than in the schools characterized by more individual and traditional ways of working. Three general conclusions concerning ESD implementation are drawn: 1) Prior to launching a whole school project for ESD, it is desirable to make an inventory of the capacity building capital at participating schools, and to identify contextual factors constituting external pressure on the building of capital. 2) The school improvement project and the TPD need to be locally adjusted to the available capital. 3) A strategy for adapting the project to the various external pressures needs to be developed.
This paper defines transformative language teaching for sustainability (TLS) and shows how contemporary, learner-oriented language teaching can foster important competencies and skills needed to reach the goals of education for sustainable development (ESD). The main aim of our approach is to integrate transformation-oriented ESD into language teaching in a way that considers and utilises the special features of language teaching and learning. We discuss the substantial possibilities that language education offers to ESD and propose a transformation-oriented ESD framework as the foundation for TLS, covering the linguistic and cultural features of sustainability that are central to language teaching and learning. Finally, we outline the pedagogical implications for TLS related to subject matter content and methods, that is, how language teachers can use learner-oriented language teaching methods to integrate ESD in their lessons. We propose a theory-based interdisciplinary model for the implementation of TLS in language education and language teacher education.
Research on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) implementation tends to focus primarily on student and teacher outcomes, and there have been few studies on leadership practices at the school organisation level that provide information on how quality in education contributes to ESD implementation. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical mixed methods study of existing practices in 10 highly ESD-active upper secondary schools in Sweden. The schools’ principals, who were responsible for implementing ESD, were interviewed to obtain information on the quality criteria they used to guide their work. Twenty-six criteria were identified and grouped into four main principal quality criteria on the basis of statistical analysis: Collaborative interaction and school development; Student centred education; Cooperation with local society; and Proactive leadership and continuity. This categorization both supports existing research on ESD quality criteria and highlights new criteria that are important but were previously unrecognized. Trends in the identified quality criteria are discussed and related to prior research in order to identify potentially fruitful school leadership and management for implementing ESD at the school organisational level. Research on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) implementation tends to focus primarily on student and teacher outcomes, and there have been few studies on leadership practices at the school organisation level that provide information on how quality in education contributes to ESD implementation. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical mixed methods study of existing practices in 10 highly ESD-active upper secondary schools in Sweden. The schools’ principals, who were responsible for implementing ESD, were interviewed to obtain information on the quality criteria they used to guide their work. Twenty-six criteria were identified and grouped into four main principal quality criteria on the basis of statistical analysis: Collaborative interaction and school development; Student centred education; Cooperation with local society; and Proactive leadership and continuity. This categorization both supports existing research on ESD quality criteria and highlights new criteria that are important but were previously unrecognized. Trends in the identified quality criteria are discussed and related to prior research in order to identify potentially fruitful school leadership and management for implementing ESD at the school organisational level.
Previous research has suggested that adopting a transformative school organisation perspective when implementing ESD may be more productive than the previously recommended transmissive perspectives, but it is not clear how transformative perspectives could be introduced. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical mixed methods study of existing practices in 10 highly ESD-active upper secondary schools in Sweden. The schools’ leaders, who were responsible for implementing ESD, were interviewed to obtain information on the quality criteria they used to guide their work. The arguments used by the leaders to justify their criteria were analysed and categorised based on their relationships with the transmissive and transformative quality strategies. Both school organisation perspectives were found to co-exist within the schools. A detailed analysis of schools where the transformative perspective was dominant revealed three distinct quality strategies, one of which was found to embody a strong focus on a transformative approach. This specific quality strategy is discussed and suggested as a way for interested schools to implement ESD in a more transformative way at the school organisation level.
This study applies a model of school organisation developed by one of the authors to investigate school improvement processes leading to a whole school approach in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) literature. The model is operationalized to a survey instrument and distributed to Swedish upper secondary teachers. The instrument provides empirical indications of teachers’ perceptions of their schools in terms of four major dimensions of an ESD whole school approach, the importance assigned to a holistic vision, routines and structures, professional knowledge creation, and practical pedagogical work. The aims of the study are to compare the teachers’ perception of their school organisation. We compare perceptions of teachers working in schools actively implementing ESD and teachers in comparable reference schools. Comparisons are also made between teachers from schools applying different strategies and quality approaches in implementing ESD. The results indicate that, relative to teachers in ordinary schools, those in ESD schools perceive their school organisations to have higher quality and coherence, with greater potential to support teaching and pedagogical work in practice. However, there is substantial variation in perceptions of teachers from different ESD schools. The model’s robustness is validated by coherence of earlier results in the same schools.
This study revisits the seminal question of the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD) by using a novel longitudinal approach. Scholarly attention in the past decade has been increasingly directed towards the concept of action competence for sustainability. However, little is still known about the effects of ESD as a teaching approach to help develop students’ action competence for sustainability. This study therefore adopts a three-wave longitudinal design, tapping into the development of 760 Swedish upper secondary students’ self-perceived action competence for sustainability as related to their experience of ESD teaching at their school. We can conclude that ESD has effect on students’ action competence for sustainability. Our longitudinal growth models show that it is possible to develop students’ action competence, which is affected by their experience of ESD teaching at their school. However, the students did not significantly develop the action compe- tence component confidence under their own influence. Our findings reveal that developing students’ action competence by implementing ESD in formal education takes time, and they shed light on the need for longitudinal research studies in the field of ESD.
During the past decade, numerous schools in Sweden have implemented education for sustainable development (ESD) as an explicit guiding approach in teaching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of this approach in comparison with that of pupils taught in ordinary schools. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of sustainability consciousness to represent the holistic view of sustainability. Within the concept of sustainability consciousness, we combine and investigate the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development in terms of sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was developed to evaluate pupils’ sustainability consciousness through a nationwide study in Sweden. A total of 1773 pupils from the 6th and 9th grades participated. The results indicated that the ESD profile schools had a small positive effect on the pupils’ sustainability consciousness, while in grade 9 the effect was negative. The implications for further ESD implementation are discussed.
This study contributes to an operationalization of the concept of action competence for sustainability through the theoretical development and empirical validation of a new 12-item Likert-scale questionnaire: the Self-Perceived Action Competence for Sustainability Questionnaire, SPACS-Q. Other scales in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) typically measure concepts such as pro-environmental and sustainability attitudes and behaviors, and therefore do not fully cover the concept of action competence for sustainability. An action differs from a 'mere' behavior in that it is voluntary and targeted at bringing about change, which is the overarching goal of ESE. We define action competence as a latent capacity among individuals to act sustainably. We introduce a novel scale measuring this seminal concept. Totally, 614 Swedish adolescents aged 12-19 participated in this study. The scale includes three latent subconstructs: i) knowledge of action possibilities, ii) confidence in one's own influence, and iii) the willingness to act. Confirmatory factor analyses, reliability measures and investigation of convergent validity reveal a questionnaire instrument with excellent psychometric quality. We put forward that the SPACS-Q is a novel and theory-driven, empirically reliable and valid, instrument, and encourage fellow researchers to use the SPACS-Q when investigating people's action competence for sustainability in various contexts.
The UNESCO-led Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) underscores the need to increase teachers' capacities to promote sustainable actions through ESD, and several capacity-building teaching guides have been developed with that purpose. From the perspectives of the pluralistic and transformative traditions of education, these guides should support teachers' capacity to facilitate democratic education processes through which students are empowered to engage with different ways to problematize unsustainable actions. However, social practice theory scholars' critique of behavior-oriented theories - which is largely neglected in ESD research - provides reasons to suspect that the latter theories' problematization of unsustainable actions dominates the guides. This would significantly limit their empowering potential. This study draws on the 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach, to explore how ESD guides for secondary climate change education problematize unsustainable actions and examine the possibilities and limitations these problematizations constitute for empowering political engagement.
The UNESCO-led Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) stresses the importance of building teachers' capacity for an ESD transforming how people think and act. From the perspective of the pluralistic tradition, this creates challenges related to this tradition's notion that educators should facilitate open-ended democratic education processes. This study examines these challenges through a critical policy analysis drawing on the 'what's the problem represented to be? approach. It departs from democratic theories' emphasis on cultivating both social unity and disunity as well as from their diverse problematizations of this tension. It shows how different problematizations create particular possibilities and limitations to solve the challenges. This is demonstrated through an analysis of teaching guides, linked to the GAP, on how democratic processes can be facilitated in climate change education. The study also provides a discussion of how the limitations can be approached and the guides improved.
Young students have raised their voices in debates on what action for sustainable development (SD) is necessary. Nevertheless, research that gives voice to 10 to 13-year-olds while looking into SD issues in all their complexity of interrelated environmental, social, and socio-economic perspectives, is scarce. This study aims to give voice to these youngsters, asking them directly how they suggest they can contribute to SD. Building on the concepts of action and SD, this qualitative study reports on early adolescents' own suggestions for action. Participants suggested direct, indirect, individual, and collective actions both in the private and public sphere. Their actions targeted SD issues with interconnections between areas concerning the planet, peace, people, partnership, and to some extent also prosperity. We compare our results with findings of earlier studies to further the discussion on how young people feel they can and want to contribute to SD.
In many countries' policy documents and curricula, teachers in the subject areas of science, social science and language are encouraged to collaborate on cross-curricular issues such as sustainable development (SD). This study is conducted in secondary schools (compulsory years 7-9) in Sweden and investigates the similarities and differences in the responses of ten teacher groups (forty-three teachers in total) to questions about their teaching contributions in their own subject areas to education for sustainable development (ESD). The overall aim is to understand how teachers of these three subject areas can contribute to cross-curricular teaching in teacher teams in the context of ESD. This is done by analysing the group responses from data collected in group discussions concerning the teaching dimensions what (content), how (methods) and why (purposes) in relation to ESD. We first analyse the teacher group responses and arguments regarding their contribution to ESD teaching from each subject area separately. Thereafter, we comparatively analyse how the different subject areas' contributions overlap or complement each other in a potential collaborative ESD teaching. The results show that teachers from different subject areas stress different yet complimentary dimensions of teaching and perspectives of ESD. The implications for cross-curricular teaching in ESD are also discussed.
This study examines the perspectives of Swedish undergraduate students regarding potential conflicts between ownership rights and environmental protection. Conceptions of ?ownership? are relevant in relation to the environment and environmental protection as they can highlight a more transboundary relationship between the individual/society and nature. Students studying economics, law and political science were chosen because of their potential future transformative roles as decision makers and policy makers. Content analysis was employed to examine the written responses of 747 students from seven different universities to the open-ended survey question: Can ownership rights and environmental protection come into conflict? Students? responses were measured twice: at the very beginning of the first semester and then again at the end of the semester. The results show that students expressed a dominant view of ownership in terms of individual ownership, and associations to collective ownership were largely absent. In regards to the potential conflict between ownership rights and environmental protection, most students perceived such a conflict, and it was more common for the environment to be conceptualised as the losing party rather than the landowner. More research is needed regarding how teaching and instruction can deal with the potential conflicts between ownership (private/corporate/governmental) and environmental protection.
The article demonstrates how a questionnaire gauging students' experiences of participation in decision-making at their school can operationalise student participation in a whole school approach (WSA) to education for sustainable development model. Some 902 students in three upper secondary schools participated in the study by giving their answers to Likert-scale items developed to tap into their experience of participation in the decision-making at their school. The students identified four distinct pathways of participation: (i) School and Leadership, (ii) Teaching and Learning, (iii) Community Connections, and (iv) Student Council. The results are discussed in the light of focus group interviews with eleven of the participants. The student WSA participation questionnaire proved to be a reliable and valid instrument that, together with the student WSA participation model, can be used by school leaders wanting to increase student participation, and by researchers investigating student participation throughout the whole school.