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).
