Since its emergence, the concept of sustainability has been incorporated in geography education across the globe. China is no exception. As one of the pioneer countries in advocating environmental protection, the Chinese government has called for a paradigm shift in pedagogies in order to encourage students to effectively learn the concept and develop their ability to think in new ways, especially engaging themselves with contemporary worldviews. However, many teachers may feel that they are incapable of teaching sustainability. Therefore, it is important to examine whether subject teachers have the ability to implement sustainability education. To fill this research gap, the present research focused on a case study of an in-service Chinese geography teacher teaching sustainability in a junior middle school in China. In order to deeply understand his teaching, this research adopted the form of interviews, supplemented by the analysis of relevant teaching documents. The results indicated that the two themes taught in the seventh and eighth grades, respectively, involved mainly environmental sustainability with some connection to economic sustainability, but fell short of socio-cultural sustainability. This study calls for more sustainability elements in geography curriculums, particularly with the inclusion of socio-cultural sustainability. In this article, research and practical implications have been given.

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is popular for studying behavioral intentions. While the direct relationships between the three antecedents (i.e., attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) and intentions in the TPB have been extensively studied, the authors of this study hoped to draw attention to the variable “commitment”. It is interesting to explore whether commitment mediates the relationship between the three antecedents and intentions. Furthermore, this study attempted to investigate if the TPB is appropriate for explaining students’ intentions to learn sustainability. Like many other countries, sustainability has been widely integrated into primary and secondary education in China. However, if students are not interested in or feel that they are not capable of learning sustainability, they may be reluctant to do so. Therefore, this study aimed to examine an extended TPB model with a sample of 181 students from a public junior secondary school in China through factor-based partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results showed that the model could explain the intention to learn sustainability. Specifically, this research found that commitment mediated the relationships of attitudes toward learning sustainability, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control to the behavioral intention.