دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بررسی مفهوم توسعه پایدار در آموزش برای توسعه پایدار: مفاهیم برای تحقیقات ESD - اشپرینگر 2017

Abstract

This paper explores how three major factors in education for sustainable development (ESD) practice view the concept of sustainable development (SD). These are (a) international policy documents which shaped ESD, (b) the academic discourse in the field of ESD and (c) students and teachers. SD is a complex concept, and it can be interpreted in several ways. This paper adopts a holistic approach to SD, according to which SD is considered an integrated concept of three dimensions, namely the environment, the economy and the society. The significance of the holistic approach to the SD concept is emphasized in the recent international policy documents and by the academic discourse, as well. However, teachers and students do not hold yet a holistic understanding of the concept. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this ESD policy–practice gap and to propose implications in ESD practice and research.

5 Implications for ESD practice and research

Teachers have difficulties in helping students to acquire a correct understanding of the SD concept (Walshe 2008). However, teachers get little support to teach such a difficult concept (Walshe 2008). Their conceptions of the SD concept are translated into curriculum planning and teaching (Stevenson 2006; Birdsall 2014, 2015). Teachers often simplify sustainability issues in order to make them easier for the students to understand (Sund 2015), which threatens the cultivation of students’ skills to reflect and evaluate contesting perspectives (Jickling 1994; Vare and Scott 2007). Thus, further teacher training in SD appears to be absolutely necessary (Borg et al. 2014). The following paragraphs explain what the main characteristics of teacher and student education should be.

Research in teacher professional development and ESD tends to see sustainability issues through EE lenses (Stables and Scott 2002). And this is reflected in the results of recent research regarding teachers’ conceptions of the SD concept. In this case, an interdisciplinary approach in teaching ESD in the teacher training programmes could provide opportunities to teachers to see SD issues more holistically. The same goes for students. As Walshe (2016) argues, interdisciplinary teaching could help students to consider SD issues from plural perspectives, which, in turn, according to Jickling (2003), enables them to develop their own views about sustainability (Walshe 2016). A holistic approach to SD is often ignored in teaching practice. A traditional normative EE approach is implemented rather than an ESD-oriented one (Borg et al. 2012; Olsson et al. 2015; Boeve-de Pauw et al. 2015; Olsson and Gericke 2016).