Education and, in particular, school as an institution is assigned an extensive role when it comes to implementing Sustainable Development. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) takes up the core idea of education and specifies it for action fields in the context of Sustainable Development by aspiring to foster both the competencies and the readiness which enable a person to critically reflect, evaluate and permanently renew current societal practice (Künzli David, Bertschy 2012). Referring to this, ESD is supposed to contribute to enabling learners to engage in sociopolitical controversies in which the desirable aims and measures for Sustainable Development are determined and justified.

These questions of Sustainable Development, which always – inter alia – refer to morally right action, cannot be answered on the grounds of confirmed knowledge only. Instead, they demand that a difference between sustainable and non-sustainable developments can be made. This in turn requires the ability to pass moral-ethical judgement (Gresch et al. 2013), since the term Sustainability in the understanding of the United Nations raises questions of good life and the meeting of basic needs of everyone. These are questions that require ethical and moral considerations and judgements. Thus, ESD is aimed at the ability to reflect on different values with regard to aims and measures in the field of Sustainable Development.

It is generally agreed that the engagement with normative-ethical questions has to play a major role in the context of ESD (Öhmann 2007; Sund, Wickman 2011a und b). However, there are hardly any studies on questions such as: What are the normative-ethical basics of ESD, what concrete aims and challenges follow the planning of educational processes, what role is attributed to the teacher when dealing with normative-ethical questions in ESD classes, und what are the challenges and limitations with regard to the engagement with such questions within ESD classes (Sund, Öhmann 2011)? These questions were studied within the framework of a theoretically-conceptually designed study, which is presented in the contribution and which served as preliminary work for an empirical study.

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