Pre-service Technology Teachers' Experiences of Project Based Learning as Pedagogy for Education for Sustainable Development

Asheena Singh-Pillay

doi:10.13189/ujer.2020.080530

Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative study, which embraced the interpretative paradigm. The study explored Pre–Service Technology Teachers' (PSTTs) experiences of Project–based learning (PBL) as pedagogy while learning about Education for Sustainable development (ESD) at a university in South Africa. The paper advances the rationale that adopting a pedagogy that contextualised PBL has allowed for transformation in the perception and behaviour of PSTTs about sustainability issues, critical citizenship as well as their role as future teachers. Furthermore, it improved the capacity of people to address environmental and developmental issues. Mezirow, theory on transformative learning guided the study theoretically. Fifty-four PSTTs, who were enrolled for the processing module in technology education in 2016, were purposively selected to participate in the study. Participants were assured of confidentiality and anonymity. Data was generated in three stages. This paper reports on stage two and three of data generation, which required PSTTs to participate in focus group interviews and maintain a reflective diary of their experiences of PBL and ESD. Data was subjected to thematic analysis. The findings revealed that PBL increased application of content to solve sustainability problems. Furthermore, the findings bring to the fore new dimensions to the learning that PSTTs experienced when they engaged in PBL, such as overcoming prejudices, team work, awareness of their social responsibilities to the community and the development of skills for sustainability change agents. These finding have implication for pedagogy used to infuse ESD within the curriculum and overcome social cultural stereotypes.

Highlights

Education is construed globally as a conduit for arousing awareness of sustainability issues and to bring about a change in attitude, values and behaviour patterns of individual with regard to sustainability (Lieberman, 1977; World Bank, 2012)
This section reports on the thematic analysis of data from the reflective dairy and focus group interviews to respond to the research question: What are Pre–Service Technology Teachers’ (PSTTs)’ learning experiences of Project–based learning (PBL) when they engage in Education for sustainable development (ESD)
Thematic analysis indicates that PSTTs have 3 key learning experiences about PBL while engaging in ESD, namely PBL promotes social learning PBL promotes real world context for learning about

Summary

Introduction

Education is construed globally as a conduit for arousing awareness of sustainability issues and to bring about a change in attitude, values and behaviour patterns of individual with regard to sustainability (Lieberman, 1977; World Bank, 2012). International support for pre-service teacher programmes to teach ESD can be traced back to the 1971 European International Union for Conservation of Nature conference, the Belgrade Charter (UNESCO-UNEP, 1976) Tbilisi Declaration, Decade of education for sustainable development (UNESCO, 2004) and more recently UNESCOs Global Action Programme (GAP) which purports that sustainability begins with teachers (UNESCO, 2014). It is widely argued by Crawford (2016) that by including ESD in per-service teacher training programmes novice teachers will graduate with the capacity to embed ESD into their day-to-day work and, enable widespread implementation in schools. It is worth noting that in Higher Education Intuitions there is often no adequate institutional support and incentives for those academics willing to integrate ESD in their activities (Hoover & Harder, 2014), and most of the efforts lie primarily on academics (Krizek Newport, White & Townsend, 2012)

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Conclusion