ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) is a major issue in current discussions in education and politics. Indicators are becoming one of the most commonly applied monitoring and assessment strategies. Our article presents an indicator for ESD-relevance of university-based primary and secondary school teacher education study programs in Germany. To this end, we developed a novel quantitative approach based on qualitative content analysis. With the help of a set of search-terms and their combinations, we developed an automatized content analysis procedure that measures the different dimensions of ESD in German initial teacher education programs and modules at universities. In contrast to previous approaches, our indicator is aimed at all school subjects and their pedagogies and applies a broad understanding of ESD based on UNESCO’s ESD learning objectives (UNESCO, 2017).

Teacher education is one of the key areas of ESD implementation in formal education systems. Accordingly, in ESD indicator research, teacher education is a widely covered area (e.g. Adomßent et al., 2011; Tilbury, Janousek, Elias, & Bach, 2007; UNECE, 2006; Waltner, Rieß, & Brock, 2018). However, the measurement of ESD implementation in teacher education is anything but straightforward. First, ESD is a whole-institution approach (Buckler & Creech, 2014). That is, an indicator or set of indicators of teacher education must be able to measure not only the content of particularly relevant (e.g., geography, biology) but all teacher education courses, as well as the pedagogical methods, values, and skills conveyed during the education and training of teachers. Second, because of the many arenas and levels of teacher education – pre-service, in-service, further education of teachers, etc. – it also has to be measured with different sets of indicators. Moreover, as teacher education encompasses both the initial education of future teachers as well as the further education of in-service teachers, and even extra-curricular activities of teachers, the set of indicators must be relevant at all stages of the input-process-output-outcome model of education monitoring (Rode & Michelsen, 2008; van Herpen, 1992). Surprisingly, both international and national ESD indicator guidelines or frameworks (e.g., Adomßent et al., 2011;  Tilbury et al., 2007; UNECE, 2006) are silent on exactly how to conceptualize and measure ESD in teacher education in the first place.

Our article fills this research gap by developing an output indicator for the measurement of the ESD relevance of initial teacher education study programs at German universities based on a content analysis of module descriptions and examination regulations. However, we moved beyond existing approaches based exclusively on search-term-based qualitative content analysis and identified a set of conceptual and thematic ESD search-terms and their combinations that allows for an exclusively software-based analysis. This allowed us to apply the broadest possible understanding of ESD as conceptualized by the UNESCO (Rieckmann, 2018) and, at the same time, to develop a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely indicator (Tilbury et al., 2007). 

We applied a multistage process to identify the most relevant and effective search terms for the different dimensions of ESD (both conceptual and thematic). First, we identified a large set of conceptual and thematic ESD search-terms from a multitude of studies analyzing the ESD relevance of different German education documents (including education laws, school curricula, study and examination regulations of initial teacher education programs, textbooks, etc.) from a number of recent studies (e.g., 2013; Brock, 2018; Waltner, Glaubitz, & Rieß, 2017) and based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDs) as operationalized for ESD by the UNESCO (Rieckmann, 2018; UNESCO, 2017). In several subsequent steps, we then narrowed down this list of more than 200 ESD search-terms to a small set of 30 words and their combinations using a sample of study and examination regulations (or module descriptions) of teacher education courses at 14 German universities in five federal states. We relied on Brock’s (2018) sample, as her sampling explicitly accounts for the different cross-cutting religious, political, geopolitical and demographic differences, and cleavages in Germany. We combined several rounds of software-assisted search-term-based qualitative-quantitative content analysis – where every software-identified sequence is coded for ESD relevance manually – with statistical analysis gradually identifying the most relevant and effective search-terms and their combinations.

Our indicator, and more importantly, our novel approach of indicator development is highly relevant for both the fields of ESD and education indicator research. Our quantitative indicator is based on careful qualitative content analysis. The identification of search-term combination allows the measurement of ESD relevance of such thematic and conceptual dimensions (e.g., societal dimensions, ESD in pedagogy, such as social inclusion in the classroom), which were mostly missed by the previous qualitative approaches based on single-search terms expressing a rather conceptual understanding of ESD. Equally importantly, the new indicator allows the analysis of ESD relevance of teacher education across a previously unprecedented scale and thematic diversity. As we developed the indicator in a large, politically and culturally diverse federal country with a highly decentralized education system, our process could serve as a blueprint for education indicators based on content analysis in other countries.

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