Complexity as a challenge in teaching sustainable development issues: an exploration of teachers’ beliefs

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This article reports the results of an empirical investigation on teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning and the globalised world as a teaching subject. Following a qualitative reconstructive approach, the study investigated how teachers’ beliefs and the way teachers address the complexity of sustainability issues relate to each other. Based on 17 narrative interviews with secondary school teachers in Germany, the study reveals patterns of how teachers address the complexity of sustainability issues and how these patterns become visible in the way teachers construct the interconnectedness of the world and in their understanding of teaching and learning. Three abstracted ways were reconstructed from the empirical material: (1) promoting an authentic perspective in teacher-led approaches, (2) focusing on multiple perspectives in fact-based approaches and (3) emphasising reflexivity in addition to multiple perspectives on global issues in student-centred approaches. The article discusses the findings in terms of their relevance to current knowledge about students’ learning processes.