Abstract
This study builds on a research-practitioner partnership embedded within an education for sustainable development (ESD) project and aims to explore the major potential challenges (i.e., disciplinary boundaries set by subject specialization, especially in secondary education) and success factors (i.e., teacher co-learning experiences in ESD) associated with differences in teachers’ professional action competence (PACesd) in a sample of 557 in-service teachers in primary and secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. The study employed a recently validated PACesd measurement instrument and involved quantitative data analysis in a structural equation modelling framework. The results show that primary education teachers tend to report higher PACesd levels compared to their peers in secondary education. Moreover, regardless of educational level, gender and teaching experience, all teachers participating in a working group or a learning community in ESD are more likely to show higher levels of PACesd. Implications of the findings, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.
Highlights
Regardless of the benefits that subject specialization offers, secondary education teachers are often constrained by their subject-specific knowledge and find it difficult or too ambitious to tackle complex interdisciplinary topics or to apply holistic and pluralistic pedagogical approaches, while a potential lack of commitment and willingness to teach education for sustainable development, largely due to prioritizing subject-specific topics and methodologies, may hinder their support for education for sustainable development practices [4,14,28,29,30,31]. Given these insights from previous research, which were corroborated by the subjective impressions of the school coaches participating in the VALIES project, in this study, we hypothesize that teachers in secondary education will tend to show lower levels of professional action competence in education for sustainable development compared to their primary education peers
Educational institutions and educational practitioners worldwide are increasingly committed to the implementation of education for sustainable development and recognize that teachers and educators at all educational levels have a crucial role to play in education for sustainable development implementation and must be supported [1,7]
In this study, building on a research-practitioner partnership embedded within the VALIES project [42], we set out to identify some of these potential challenges and success factors in developing teachers’ professional action competence in education for sustainable development in a sample of 557 in-service teachers in primary and secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium
Summary
Research Unit Edubron, Department of Training and Education Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Research Unit Didactica, Antwerp School of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp, Abstract: This study builds on a research-practitioner partnership embedded within an education for sustainable development (ESD) project and aims to explore the major potential challenges (i.e., disciplinary boundaries set by subject specialization, especially in secondary education) and success factors (i.e., teacher co-learning experiences in ESD) associated with differences in teachers’ professional action competence (PACesd) in a sample of 557 in-service teachers in primary and secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. Regardless of educational level, gender and teaching experience, all teachers participating in a working group or a learning community in ESD are more likely to show higher levels of PACesd.
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