Abstract
Education is expected to support the development of a more sustainable way of thinking, working, and living. Although there is a broad range of literature on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the role of principals in the implementation of sustainability and ESD in schools has rarely been taken into consideration. However, based on the results of school effectiveness research, one can assume that school principals exert a significant influence on ESD. Sustainability is a leadership issue. When a school aims at integrating sustainability and ESD, the principal plays a pivotal role. She or he has to support the endeavor wholeheartedly and credibly, organize a participative process of school development, emphasize sustainability and ESD in the daily life of the school, support teaching staff in the application of ESD, and offer students opportunities to launch their own initiatives. This article for the special issue on “Sustainability in leadership and education” is a theoretical concept paper based on a literature review and the authors’ conceptual work. It offers a model and seeks to support principals in leading their schools towards sustainability. Therefore, a framework of four stages of the integration of sustainability and ESD in a school is defined. For each of these stages, a number of practical actions and management strategies are suggested and explained in detail.
Highlights
There is widespread agreement that education plays a crucial role in the development of sustainable societies and economic systems
Other studies have shown that a principal’s personal care and commitment to environmentalism and sustainable development plays a large role in implementing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in school policy [27,28]
The aim is to stimulate and tap into the problem-solving behavior and creativity of the community. It is the task of the principal to start and organize this participative process in order to win over pupils, teachers, parents, external partners, and the school authorities
Summary
There is widespread agreement that education plays a crucial role in the development of sustainable societies and economic systems. In the Global Action Program (GAP) Education for Sustainable Development, the successor to the UN Decade of ESD, UNESCO defines “transforming learning and training environments” as one of five priority fields of action: “ESD is about much more than preaching and teaching on sustainable development. Other studies have shown that a principal’s personal care and commitment to environmentalism and sustainable development plays a large role in implementing ESD in school policy [27,28]. As Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink pointed out: “Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain” [32] (p. 1)
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