Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education: Canadian Perspectives

Abstract

The National Roundtable on Environmental & Sustainability Education in Pre-Service Teacher Education, which took place in June 2016 at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, was a remarkable event in Canadian teacher education history. This National Roundtable brought together key educational stakeholders to discuss the state of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in Canada and to create an action plan for enhancing ESE nationwide. National Roundtable participants, which included faculty, researchers, teachers, community educators, and policy-makers, engaged in a large-scale collaborative inquiry process in which they discussed, debated, and analyzed past and current pedagogical practices; structural, programmatic, and economic challenges; theoretical and other explanatory frameworks; and critical areas of the field in need of further research. This chapter documents and reflects on the National Roundtable as indicative of the growing interest in Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education (ESE-TE) and discusses some of the impacts this event may have had on ESE-PTE in Canada.