ESD has been adopted globally as a consequence of the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014, which has reshaped curricula worldwide. In the years to come, it is suggested that the Global Action Programme (GAP) on education for sustainable development (ESD) will generate and scale-up concrete actions implementing ESD globally and locally (UNESCO, 2014). According to the GAP, all levels of the school organization should be included in the process of implementing ESD in educational practices, a so-called whole school approach. However, empirical studies are a missing link in the discourse around ESD, where decisions and implementation strategies are heavily based on policy recommendations and practitioners’ gut feelings (Scott, 2013).

                      ESD can be described from the perspective of subject contents and as an approach to teaching and learning (e.g. Hopkins, 2012). Boeve-de Pauw, Gericke, Olsson & Berglund (2015) refer to these two major aspects of ESD as holism and pluralism. Holism refers to the use of multiple perspectives on sustainability issues, based on the idea that environmental problems need to be considered in relation to economic and social issues or needs, together with perspectives of the local-global and the past-present-future. As a consequence, interdisciplinarity is considered an important component to facilitate students’ understanding of the complexity of sustainability issues (Vare & Scott, 2007). The pluralistic approach to ESD deals with the teaching and learning of multiple perspectives. Essential components of this perspective focus on the development of skills and action competence for sustainability, such as democratic engagement, critical thinking and autonomy (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010; Rudsberg & Öhman, 2010).

In Sweden, students’ sustainability consciousness (SC) and students’ experiences of ESD teaching were investigated recently (e.g. Boeve de-Pauw et al., 2015; Berglund, Gericke & Chang Rundgren, 2014; Olsson, Gericke & Chang Rundgren, 2016). The main message from these studies was that ESD-certified schools generally had a limited effect on students’ SC compared to other schools, and in grade 9, even a small negative effect was found (Berglund et al., 2014; Olsson et al., 2016). Furthermore, the students in the Swedish school system, including ESD-certified schools, do not necessarily experience these approaches (Boeve de-Pauw et al., 2015). The results are somewhat disappointing since they indicate that the efforts of the past decade to implement ESD in the Swedish school system seem to have failed to provide much of the changes urged for in the UN Decade. However, Boeve-De Pauw et al. (2015) found that when pluralism and holism are included in the teaching, a higher SC among students is found. Thus, it is empirically concluded that ESD can be effective.

This study is part of a larger and systematic longitudinal research project on the implementation of whole school approaches on ESD, where the development process is guided by a TPD-programme and all the actors of a school (students, teachers and school leaders) should work together towards a common goal (UNESCO, 2014). However, at this initial stage of the school development programme we focus on whether ‘a whole school approach’-implementation program impacts on teachers’ and students’ SC. We will also investigate if teachers develop their view of ESD teaching and learning and how the students experience the teaching. We will do this by centering on the following overall questions:

1) What are the teachers’ SC and educational practices in relation to ESD?

2) Do the students’ SC and experiences of the teaching change during the process of implementing a whole school approach on ESD? If so, how?

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