This article describes an interpretive study that evaluated a new subject in teacher education called 'Education for Sustainable Development'. The study evaluated the subject for its ability to prepare pre-service teachers for their roles as environmental educators. We used perspectives in place-based pedagogy and critical thinking to underpin the subject design and our analysis. Data sources include instructor journals, planning documents, interviews with students and student thinking books. Interpretive analysis of the data corpus was a collaborative process that involved both subject instructors and students who took the subject. Themes that emerged from the research were centred around: (1) how the students built connections between primary school education and environmental education; (2) how students developed action competence through the activities in the subject; (3) how students were challenged to think differently about themselves as educators; and, (4) how the subject design presented its own challenges for both instructors and students.Keywords educators, hard, competent, environmental, be, could, action, preparing Disciplines Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication DetailsNielsen, W. S., Andersen, P., Hurley, A., Sabljak, V., Petereit, A., Hoskin, V. & Hoban, G. F. (2012) Australian Journal of Environmental Education, vol. 28(2), 92-107, 2012 AbstractThis article describes an interpretive study that evaluated a new subject in teacher education called 'Education for Sustainable Development'. The study evaluated the subject for its ability to prepare pre-service teachers for their roles as environmental educators. We used perspectives in place-based pedagogy and critical thinking to underpin the subject design and our analysis. Data sources include instructor journals, planning documents, interviews with students and student thinking books. Interpretive analysis of the data corpus was a collaborative process that involved both subject instructors and students who took the subject. Themes that emerged from the research were centred around: (1) how the students built connections between primary school education and environmental education; (2) how students developed action competence through the activities in the subject; (3) how students were challenged to think differently about themselves as educators; and, (4) how the subject design presented its own challenges for both instructors and students.The purpose of this article is to explore the design of a new subject in the Bachelor of Primary Education at the University of Wollongong (UOW) through the experiences of the designers (the subject instructors) and students who participated in the subject in its first year. Further, we conducted the evaluation of the subject as a collaborative research project with four pre-service teachers who had been students in the subject. The new subject is called 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) and is a core subject in the autumn term of the fourth and final year of the degre...