Sustainability: A Regional Australian Experience of Educating Secondary Geography Teachers

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.

Revisiting Education for Sustainable Development: Methods to Inspire Secondary School Students toward Renewable Energy

“…The selected 25 articles were analyzed comprehensively by reading through and finding out the authors perspectives, results from the experiments conducted and analysis of the surveys conducted. Based on the analyses of the selected articles, most previous research identified the lack of RE-concept-centered education and ESD at the secondary school level of education globally [20,[23][24][25]31,33,39,42,43]. This lack of education directly contributed to the lack of awareness about RE and its concepts among secondary school students [21,34].…”

“…Additionally, a lack of curricula on RE and ESD was visible; although the students exhibited knowledge about the existing socio-environmental issues in the world, their actions did not correspond to their knowledge because of their lack of interest and motivation regarding environmental issues. This could be overcome by introducing systematic curricula on environmental and RE topics from an early stage along with other STEM curricula to expose students to the various concepts of RE and other sustainable development technologies [26,39]. However, simply introducing the curricula would be insufficient if the teaching and learning approaches fail to explore active learning involving the community, home, and technological factors.…”

Sustainability Education in China: Lessons Learnt from the Teaching of Geography

“…With a highly centralized approach to the climate challenge, China may be able to derail "environmental Armageddon" [40]. According to the innovation theory, helping students develop a social innovation mindset makes them more aware of how to innovate and what might prevent them from innovating when they are faced with a sustainability issue [12]. As a country with the largest population in the world, attracting its people, including students, to the concept of sustainability in all relevant aspects is of particular importance.…”

“…Thus, teachers would prefer sustainability topics that are more related to environmental concepts than socio-cultural concepts. As noted by Cai [17], the subject of geography is new to both teachers and students of junior middle schools, so teachers may lack deep subject-matter knowledge regarding sustainability as well as the pedagogy for sustainability in geography [12]. In the new China's standards, the requirements in SD have not been explicitly stated.…”

“…Since its emergence, the concept of sustainability has been incorporated in geography education across the globe. For example, in Australia, sustainability has been one of the three crosscurricular priorities in the school curriculum [12]. SD has also been a focal point in the Swedish geography curriculum [5].…”