Developing teacher competences for education for sustainable development through reflection: the Environment and School Initiatives approach

Source: Journal of Education for Teaching, Volume 33, Issue 2 May 2007, pages 241 - 256

The introduction to this paper gives a short overview of the Environment and Schools Initiatives (ENSI) perspective on teaching competences.

We argue that as change is one of the key elements of sustainable development, reflection that helps to adapt educational practice to a continuously developing world should be a starting point for every educator dealing with education for sustainable development (ESD).

The ENSI perspective is that different competence lists constitute a basis for this continuous reflection. The paper gives two examples from ENSI activities in the field of developing teacher reflection regarding ESD in teacher education. For pre-service teacher education a one-year, action research based training course is examined. In in-service education an analysis of a sequence of project supporting workshops is presented. The paper concludes by identifying some future steps, which are necessary if teacher competences are to be used in ESD.