دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی آکادمیک در زمینه آموزش برای توسعه پایدار: مفاهیم آنها در مورد توسعه پایدار - الزویر 2018

Recent policy and academic voices in the field of Education for Sustainable Development put forward the importance of a holistic approach to the concept of Sustainable Development. We investigated the personal understanding of ‘Sustainable Development’ of scholars involved in teacher training programs and in the academic field of Education for Sustainable Development. To this purpose, an on-line survey was conducted based on the principle of comparative judgement. After careful selection, 249 academics were found to fit the specific profile for inclusion into the study. All of them were invited and56 of them participated. The instrument consisted of 16 statements built specifically to reflect different interpretations of sustainable development: fragmented, separated, holistic and integrated perspectives. Each participant compared 12 pairs of statements and were asked to decide which one better represented their interpretation of the concept of Sustainable Development in the context of Education for Sustainable Development. Using the D-PAC methodology for comparative judgement, our results show that the statements that were most often chosen prioritized an understanding of Sustainable Development according to which two or three of the dimensions of the concept (environment, society, economy) are seen as separated to each other and less often in an integrated way. The scale reliability was equal to 0.79, indicating good quality of the measurement. The results show that academics in the field of Education for Sustainable Development do not conceive of the concept of Sustainable Development holistically. There is also a tendency towards social and economic aspects of Sustainable Development. Implications for Education for Sustainable Development research and teacher training are discussed.

7. Conclusion

The concept of Sustainable Development is central to Education for Sustainable Development. A holistic understanding of the SD concept on the part of the several stakeholders is of high importance. This paper explores the degree to which SD conceptions of academics in the field of ESD worldwide is holistic, and if there are any differences among them. If academics do not hold a holistic view of SD, it is most possible that their courses, as part of teacher training programmes, will not convey a holistic understanding of the SD concept. However, this study provides evidence that academics in the field of ESD do not see the SD concept holistically. Their tendency to recognize the social and economic dimensions more than the environmental ones, allows us to distinguish ESD teaching from an EE tradition, which may have implications for ESD research and practice. In addition to this, there is no consensus among the academics as to the meaning of the SD concept. Academics have diverging SD conceptions, which may have implications for teacher training programmes as well.

Further research is now needed to examine how the SD conceptions of ESD academics influence student teachers’ conceptions. Future research should also examine the SD conceptions of other university stakeholders and their influence on trainee teachers’ SD conceptions. Such stakeholders are administrators, fellow trainee students, and the academic staff of other subjects (e.g., STEM, social sciences, arts), who also teach in teacher training programmes.