This paper explores an intervention that aims at developing education for sustainable development (ESD) as a prospect of teacher education. The intervention is conducted as an interdisciplinary work assignment in a course on teaching and learning.  Education for sustainable development has for a long time been a prioritized area in both national and international strategy documents (e.g. Ministry of Education and Research, 2012;  UNESCO, 2006). Nevertheless, this effort has not been reflected in our teacher education institution. The intervention is therefore an attempt to resolve this deficiency.

Our overarching aim is to explore how ESD, as the main challenge for education in our time, could be realized in teacher education. ESD has a clear interdisciplinary scope; “No one discipline can claim ESD for its own, but all disciplines can contribute to ESD” (UNESCO 2006: 31), but this seems to be very demanding to accomplish in classroom practice. Therefore, we aspire to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on ESD where we build on theoretical resources from the student teachers' different subject areas in order to facilitate future teachers’ engagement in interdisciplinary ESD.

Our research questions are:

• What are the student teachers’ experiences and concerns after the intervention week with an interdisciplinary work assignment focusing on education for sustainable development?
• What implications can be drawn for the teacher education program?

Despite ESD´s interdisciplinary strategic approach there has been a tradition for that ESD has been managed by science education and to some degree the social sciences in school and teacher education.  Andresen et al., (2015) report that few projects have been concerned with inclusion, democracy, or social justice, indicating an understanding of ESD within the frame of natural sciences.  UNESCO (2006) describes education for sustainable development as interdisciplinary and value-driven. ESD must be embedded in the whole curriculum, and the values and principles underpinning sustainable development must be made explicit, so that they can be examined, critically analyzed and debated and applied within different school subjects. Teaching that is geared simply to passing on knowledge should be recast into an approach in which teachers and learners participate together to acquire knowledge and play a role in shaping the environment of their educational institutions.

Teacher education institutions have been defined as key agents for introducing and strengthening sustainability in education, requiring “interdisciplinary coursework on sustainability for student teachers” (UNESCO, 2005: 43) and interdisciplinary research (UNESCO 2005: 51). Zhou (2015) suggests a systematic planning of environmental issues in all method courses. However, as a start, we have introduced the ESD perspective within our institution's existing structures, process and local resources as proposed by Nolet (2013). The ESD interdisciplinary work assignment was introduced during a week designed focus on integrating educational theory and practice by working practically with group talk. The innovation was making the week’s topic ESD.

In line with the UNESCO framework, pluralism of thought is seen as a resource for

ESD by Wals (2010) who argues that the different values, perspectives and ideas among students are valuable when it comes to developing creative and innovative solutions to the problems of adaptation and transition to more sustainable societies. However, it is also a source of conflict and frustration. During the week there was a lecture on different types of talk; cumulative, disputational and exploratory talk (Mercer and Littleton, 2007). The students’ discussions when designing a functional and presentable teaching lesson offered an opportunity to experience these discourses. The balance of socialization and subjectification (Biesta, 2011) would need to be negotiated and resolved together with tensions of identities, purposes and cultures of different school subjects and academic fields.

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