Abstract
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number four seeks an equitable and widespread education that enables an outcome of sustainable development by 2030. Intersecting the studies of society and earth processes, a geographical education is well placed to make cohesive sense of all the individual knowledge silos that contribute to achieving sustainability. Geography education is compulsory for the first three years of the secondary education curriculum in Australia; however, research has shown that many geography teachers are underprepared and report limitations in their teaching of sustainability. This article engages with this research problem to provide a critical reflection, using experiential knowledge as an analytical lens, on how tertiary level geography training at one Australian regional university can equip undergraduate teacher education students with the values, knowledge, and skills needed to develop their future students’ understanding and appreciation of the principles of sustainability. The authors unpacked a geography minor for a Bachelor of Secondary Education degree at Central Queensland University and, deploying content analysis, explain how three units in that minor can develop these students’ values, knowledge, and skills through fostering initiatives and activities. The analysis was framed by elements of pedagogy that offer learners a context for developing active, global citizenship and participation to understand the interdependencies of ecological, societal, and economic systems including a multisided view of sustainability and sustainable development. The study concluded that the three geography units engage student teachers in sustainable thinking in a variety of ways, which can have a wider application in the geography curricula in other teacher education courses. More importantly, however, the study found that there is a critical need for collaboration between university teachers of sustainability content and university teachers of school-based pedagogy in order to maximise the efficacy of sustainability education in schools.
Highlights
The broad objective of this article is to show how tertiary level geography training meets the challenge of equipping undergraduate education students with the values, knowledge, and skills needed to teach about sustainability that is embedded in geography in the Australia school curriculum
In the context of a reported under-preparedness of geography teachers in schools to integrate sustainability into their teaching practices because of a lack of deep subjectmatter knowledge around both sustainable development and pedagogy for sustainable development [22], this article provides a regional Australian focus on how tertiary level geography training meets the challenge of equipping undergraduate education students with the values, knowledge, and skills needed to teach about sustainability that is embedded in geography in the Australia curriculum
We analysed the limitations of the units to achieve this preparedness and pointed out any challenges to improving teacher education geography courses. This method allowed us to use our experiential knowledge as an analytical concept to reflect on how these units incorporate sustainability education, to explain how we link our teaching of sustainability to the Australian geography school curriculum that concerns sustainability education, and to make informed suggestions around education for sustainability (EfS) pedagogy for teacher education [28]
Summary
The broad objective of this article is to show how tertiary level geography training meets the challenge of equipping undergraduate education students with the values, knowledge, and skills needed to teach about sustainability that is embedded in geography in the Australia school curriculum. Sustainability is one of the three cross-curricular priorities in the Australian school curriculum [1] In this context, sustainability has been developed around the three key concepts of systems, world views, and futures. EfS is defined in the Australian curriculum as “to develop the knowledge, skills, values, and world views necessary for people to act in ways that contribute to more sustainable patterns of living” [1]. It is more than knowing about sustainability and cannot be attained by adding more units to an already crowded and often incoherent teacher education curriculum [3]. The features of a geographical approach to enquiry provide a much more effective means of developing an environmental education that is more cognisant of the deeper aspects of sustainability than a standard scientific approach to enquiry-based learning [18]
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