Role of Teachers in Building the Concept of Sustainable Development: Success or Failure

Ayaz Muhammad Khan,Tayyibah Roohi,Amber Jamshaid,Amna Ramzan

doi:10.32350/jarms/2020/0101/906

Ayaz Muhammad Khan, Tayyibah Roohi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.32350/jarms/2020/0101/906

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Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) is a rich, challenging and thought-provoking construct in social sciences. The main purpose of this paper was to identify and explore the role played by primary school teachers in building up the idea of sustainable development (SD) among students. This paper was intended to identify that how a teacher can successfully execute the concept of SD by influencing students’ minds at the primary level. Quantitative survey technique were utilized for data collection. All the primary school teachers of Lahore division comprised the population of the study. Through multistage sampling technique, 352 primary school teachers were selected as participants of the study. A self-developed SD questionnaire incorporating four major factors (teachers’ awareness, pedagogy, curricular and co-curricular activities) with Cronbach’s alpha value = .93 was used to measure the role of teachers in building the sustainability concept among students at primary level. The results indicated a significant mean score difference among SD scores of teachers, sector wise (private and public). Furthermore, the results also reconnoitered the significant difference (p=.04) between the mean scores of female and male teachers in building up the SD concept in students’ minds.

Highlights

This research aimed to explore the role of primary school teachers as agents of sustainable development (SD) among students with respect to their own perception about this notion, their pedagogy, how helpful they believe the implemented curriculum is, and with the help of co-curricular activities they support their students in developing the concept of susutaniability
From the point of view of those teachers who are involved in SD and other environmental exercises, these findings are surprising
The results revealed that our language for sustainability was essentially not a piece of most scholars’ vocabulary

Summary

Introduction

The idea or notion of sustainable development (SD) became popular after the publication of a report presented by “World Commission on Environment and Development” that signified the concept and importance of SD (Brundtland, 1987).“Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987, p.22).Role of Teachers in Building the Concept of...Sustainable development encourages a solid connection between individual activities and environment so that environmental, societal, and economic requirements can be fulfilled. The Secretary General of UNO assigned a task to the “World Commission on Environment and Development” in 1983 to “reexamine critical environmental and developmental problems around the world and formulate realistic proposals to address them.”. This idea was concluded in the Brundtland description titled “Our Common Future” published in 1987, which aimed to specify the needed pathway for sustainability at every stage and helped to bring forth the concept of SD at the forefront, globally. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), World Conservation Union and Caring for the Earth programme paid significant attention to the practice of “living sustainably” which is described as follows:

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