| dc.description.abstract | Swedish schools are required to educate for sustainable development (ESD). The challenges
for the teachers are demanding as the content is controversial and complex. This study
focuses on exploring the different ways teachers and student teachers reflect upon their approach
to ESD. Of particular interest is how they talk about the dilemmas they confront in
their teaching.
1. How do teachers and student teachers describe their approach to ESD?
2. How do teachers and student teachers reflect on their personal lifestyle in relation to
their professional teacher identity?
For the purposes of this study a qualitative approach with interview questions were designed
and conducted. This study uses open-ended questionnaires combined with focus-group as
well as individual interviews. The teachers and the student teachers were asked about their
reflections on their approach to ESD and how their own lifestyle affects their teaching credibility.
The different phases of transformative learning were used as an analytical tool in order
to better understand the variation in ways participants made meaning of ESD. Student
teachers’ approaches to ESD depend on both external and internal factors. Three major external
factors have been found: colleagues, time and the curriculum. The answers also describe
the teaching methods in ESD as collaborative and interdisciplinary; ESD requires
individual skills as well as a collective competence. The practicing teachers in the study
have not received any professional development concerning education for sustainable development.
However, all of them have a reflected explanation of how they teach for sustainable
development. The different perceptions held by the teachers are categorized in three dimensions,
described as a focus dimension, an action dimension and a reflection dimension. The
focus dimension shows the direction of the teaching practice, a possible difference between
environmental education and education for sustainability. The reflection dimension shows
an identification of a transformative process and the action dimension could reveal a description
of a dilemma. These three dimensions could be visualized in a 3D space of teachers’
approaches to education for sustainable development.
All of the teachers and the student teachers describe education for sustainable development
as difficult to teach since it involves conflicts and contradictions. The student teachers
express more comfort in content and teaching methods, on the other hand they perceive
more tensions with colleagues, time constraint and their lifestyle. Some teachers in the study
even avoid education for sustainable development because of its political connotations. This
implies that ESD is, indeed, difficult, and involves choices of different approaches to ESD
such as normative, fact-based and pluralistic. ESD is a contested concept and involves controversial
values which lead to dilemmas for the teacher. Dilemmas and critical self- reflection
are important for transformative learning.
These results may be important to teacher education as well as to teachers’ professional
development as they provide insights for implementation of changes in the educational system.
The use of the different phases of transformative learning as an analytical tool could
also contribute to the understanding of how teachers form their professional identity. The
findings also provides an opportunity to perform longitudinal studies as a way to identify
different trajectories of teacher´s learning processes in a dynamic and changing educational
system. Still, much work remains to identify, analyse and improve different aspects of teaching,
in order to be able to stress that the implementation of ESD is based on both research
and best practice. | sv |
