Teacher Education for Sustainability

Abstract

Our Common Future, the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) states that “the world’s teachers … have a crucial role to play” in helping to bring about “the extensive social changes” needed along the pathway towards a sustainable future (p. xiv). For teachers to play this role successfully they require a commitment to the principles of education for sustainability; without it, they may lack the skills, insights and desire to ensure that their students are provided with opportunities to learn how to contribute to the ways their communities are working to advance the transition to sustainability. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest a rationale for ensuring that education for sustainability is embedded into the initial pre-service and continuing in-service education of teachers. This rationale is supported by principles developed from the experience of two teacher education projects in the Asia-Pacific region, Teaching for a Sustainable World (Fien, 1993, 1995) and Learning for a Sustainable Environment. (Fien, Heck and Ferreira, 1997). Two general points—or caveats—need to be made at the start, however. Firstly, the literature on education for sustainability is relatively new and there has been very little explicitly written on teacher education for sustainability. Thus, it is necessary to draw on literature from the closely related field of environmental education.