Health and Land-Use Courses of Action for Education for Sustainable Development in Madagascar: Teacher Perspectives on Possibilities for Implementation

Janna Niens,Susanne Bögeholz

doi:10.3390/su132313308

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) plays a key role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. However, the implementation of ESD in education remains a challenge, particularly for countries such as Madagascar. ESD needs to consider regional realities to be relevant to learners. An expert study identified health and land-use courses of action for regionally relevant ESD in northeast Malagasy primary education. However, what about teacher perspectives on the possibilities for implementing such courses of action? The present think-aloud study with 10 Malagasy primary teachers used the Integrated Behavioral Model for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (IBM-WASH) to analyze factors that teachers perceive to be relevant for implementing health and also—as an innovation—land-use courses of action. The IBM-WASH model is a tool for identifying opportunities and barriers to a desired health behavior. It turned out that the local school’s surroundings, shared values and attitudes, and existing habits are important for implementing health and land-use courses of action. Therefore, regionally adapted health and land-use teaching should consider community-contextual, community-psychosocial, and habitual-psychosocial factors. Additionally, teachers mentioned the costs and benefits of land-use practices. Thus, land-use teaching should take the individual-technological factor into account. This paper argues for a regionally adapted ESD in teacher and school education.

Highlights

Education has the potential to form future change agents [1]
To answer research questions (RQs) 1: “Which factors do Malagasy primary teachers perceive to be relevant for implementing health-related courses of action in teaching Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)?” and RQ 2: “Which factors do Malagasy primary teachers perceive to be relevant for implementing of landuse-related courses of action in teaching ESD?”, we proceeded as follows: We first give a quantitative overview of the distribution of health-related codings and of landuse-related codings in the qualitative data with respect to the 15 factors
We respond to RQ 3: “In which way do Malagasy primary teachers perceive that health- and land-use-related courses of action differ in their possibilities of implementation for ESD?” First, we focus on comparing the coding distribution regarding health- and land-use-related courses of action through the levels of the IBM-WASH model

Summary

Introduction

Education has the potential to form future change agents [1]. Sustainable DevelopmentGoal (SDG) number 4: Quality Education explicitly addresses Education for SustainableDevelopment (ESD) [2]. Goal (SDG) number 4: Quality Education explicitly addresses Education for Sustainable. An integration of ESD into educational policies, curricula, and teacher training is still lacking in many countries [3]. Countries with low investments in quality education, such as Madagascar, are challenged to meet the required standards for ESD [4]. It includes, e.g., poor sanitary and hygienic conditions, under-nutrition and malnutrition, illnesses such as plague and malaria, and further health risks [7]. The island country has a unique biodiversity. It is severely threatened by factors such as unsustainable land use [8,9].

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion