Tracing Sustainability: An International Comparison of ESD Implementation into Lower Secondary Education

Abstract

With the progress of the DESD, increasing numbers of researchers have been developing indicators to effectively measure the implementation of ESD in formal, informal and non-formal education. This paper aims to measure the implementation of ESD in secondary school curricula in three countries carrying the fingerprints of a developed (Germany), post-colonial (Mexico) and post-socialist (Romania) condition. The authors tested a set of four indicators measuring the depth and breadth of implementation. The results show that ESD continues to exist as (hyper-) specialized add-on knowledge in an overcrowded curriculum (Jucker, 2011) that seems to further differentiate between high- and low-status knowledge (Williams, 2008). The tested indicators offer an insight into the depth and breadth of ESD implementation across the entire curriculum.

Education for Sustainability in the Secondary Sector—A Review

“…It is important that future citizens are confident agents for change for the common good, including economic, social and ecological justice, and EfS at the secondary level can enhance students’ knowledge and skills that will hopefully lead to such action (Chawla & Cushing, 2007). Salient skills for our secondary students include critical thinking, collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving (Bagoly-Simó, 2013; Di Chiro, 2014; Gough, 2006) including ‘collective action problems … in which citizens exercise the participatory virtues … persistence, courage and self-confidence, friendliness, empathy, sincerity, reasonableness/fairness, integrity, and deliberative humility and wit’ (Ferkany & Whyte, 2013, p. 17). These complex attributes need to be taught and practised within the school learning environment if our students are to become competent to make judicious environmental, political, social, economic and ecological decisions in an uncertain future (Breiting & Wickenberg, 2010; Hungerford, 2009), and in order to influence our future.…”

Moralizing meat consumption: Bringing food and feeling into education for sustainable development

“…The concept of sustainable development was introduced into formal education in the 1990s. Bagoly-Simó (2013: 57) notes that the United Nations Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, which was declared for the time period 2005–2014, stressed the significance of all forms of education in teaching and learning for a more sustainable future. The follow-up programme of the United Nations, the Global Actions Programme (GAP), further addresses specific actions with regard to ESD.…”

What Does That Have to Do with Geology? The Anthropocene in School Geographies around the World

“…First, all curricula implicitly addressed the Anthropocene. Given the relevance of the concept to geography as an academic discipline (Castree 2014a(Castree , 2014b(Castree , 2014c on the one hand and the centrality of human-environment interactions to geography as a school subject (IGU-CGE 2016) as well as its crucial role for ESD (Haubrich, Reinfried, and Schleicher 2007;Bagoly-Sim o 2013) on the other hand, the missing explicit mentioning of the Anthropocene in the curricular documents reflects the mismatch between the progress of the academic discipline and the conceptual update in geography as a school subject. Educating for a more sustainable future, however, requires, especially in the field of human-environmental interaction, students to apply the best available expert knowledge when designing alternatives to nonsustainable processes and structures they encounter.…”

“…As early as 2014, however, Bagoly-Sim o (2014) published in the same journal a comparative curricular analysis of Bavarian, Mexican, and Romanian geography curricula and found a broad and deep implementation of both the concept of sustainable development (SD) and ESDrelevant topics. In a larger project, the author compared all subjects included in the curriculum of the three countries, measuring the topic-based implementation of ESD into lower secondary education (Bagoly-Sim o 2013, 2014. The evidence showed that geography, closely followed by biology and technology, exhibited the broadest and deepest implementation of ESD topics in all three countries (Bagoly-Sim o 2013, 2014.…”