This paper will contribute to the knowledge gap in research concerning the transformation of teaching towards education for sustainable development (ESD), by investigating the process of developing a whole school approach to ESD in two Swedish schools.  The practices of ESD have been extensively described in theory. However, the transformation into concrete teaching and learning is an undeniable challenge (Kang, 2019; Sund, 2015), in particular when the aim is to develop students’ competences for taking sustainability action (Olsson, et al., 2022).  

A whole school approach to ESD is described as a way to integrate sustainability among all actors at different levels of the school organization, from leaders to teachers and students (Gericke, 2022; Wals & Mathies, 2022). Teacher professional development programs designed to support the development of a whole school approach to ESD has been shown to influence the teachers’ self-efficacy towards sustainability teaching and to support teachers to integrate ESD into their educational practice. However, we also know from research that it may take a long time before a whole school approach to ESD can be seen as fully introduced (Forssten Seiser et al., 2022) and hence, for students to experience all the components of ESD in the teaching at their school (Olsson et al., 2022). The school culture and external factors outside the schools’ mandate may also give different preconditions to successfully integrate ESD into the teaching practice (Gericke & Torbjörnsson, 2022). These different external preconditions might have great implications on how to implement ESD, which is the focus of this study to investigate what success factors and obstacles that can be identified when teachers introduce ESD into their teaching practice.

A way to explain schools’ ESD teaching culture can be to explore the selective teaching traditions in terms of fact-based, normative and pluralistic sustainability teaching (Sund, 2016). While the fact-based and normative tradition has been described as problematic for developing young people’s competences to deal with sustainability issues, the pluralistic tradition has on the other hand been described as an approach with the capacity to empower students with competences to deal with sustainability issues (Olsson et al., 2022). Pluralistic teaching could be seen as the democratic collective and participatory approach where students are involved in discussions and where different views and values are acknowledged in relation to the sustainability issue at hand (Öhman & Östman, 2019). In addition to pluralism, there are two additional and important components that compose ESD teaching and learning (Sinakou et al., 2019). The first additional component is holism, which emphasizes the importance of including environmental, economic, and social perspectives and to include both time (from past to future) and space (local to global) perspectives to the sustainability issues (Berglund & Gericke, 2022). Finally, the action orientation component includes the possibility for students to to train and develop action taking through inclusion of authentic sustainability issues in teaching and learning (Sinakou et al., 2029).

Given the difficulties for teachers to transform teaching practice towards ESD, and that ESD initiatives may not be fully tailored to the diversity of school contexts, this study focuses on how ESD practice and the teachers’ view of ESD develops in two schools with different preconditions for implementing a whole school approach to ESD. The investigation is guided by the following objective: 

How do teachers’ views of ESD teaching evolve over time as they participate in a professional development program on a whole school approach to ESD and what success factors and obstacles could be identified as the teachers introduce ESD to their teaching practice?

In the current study we report on both qualitative and quantitative data results of teachers in two schools in a Swedish municipality. The teachers in both schools participated in a teacher professional development program (TPD) aiming to introduce a whole school approach to ESD in schools in the municipality. The TPD ran for three years between December 2016 and December 2019. One joint seminar day was held each semester for all the teachers and school leaders in the participating schools. The first seminar focused on the question of the goals and importance of ESD. The second seminar focused on the holism component of ESD and the approach to the sustainability content in the teaching. From the third seminar and onwards, the focus of the seminars were on how to transform the teaching practice towards ESD and how to promote students’ competences to take action for sustainability. In between the seminars the teachers worked in teams in their respective school on the transformation process towards ESD teaching and learning. There was one or two teachers in each school who worked between 10-20 percent as ESD facilitators in each school. These facilitators met with researchers on monthly basis to get support in the ESD process at their school. The facilitators were intended to support the school leaders who lead the ESD process at their respective school, see Gericke and Torbjörnsson (2022) for a detailed description. School 1 is a primary school (grades 1-3) with about 45 teachers. One teacher was allocated time to function as ESD facilitator. The school is located in an urban multi-cultural area of the municipality. School 2 is a primary/secondary school (grades 1-9) with about 35 teachers. Two teachers were ESD facilitators. One for the primary level and one for the secondary level. School 2 is located in a rural area of the municipality. Quantitative data related to the teachers views of ESD (11 items) and their ESD teaching practice (11 items) were collected from all teachers in the schools at five occasions between December 2016 and June 2019. They responded on a five point Likert-scale from totally disagree to totally agree. In addition, we also collected qualitative data from the ESD facilitators through i) their logbooks, in which they wrote on monthly basis for the first half of the project, and towards the end of the project ii) through interviews with the facilitators after the project ended.

The preliminary findings of this study reveal differences in the level of success when introducing ESD in the two schools participating in the same TPD programme. Our quantitative findings show that teachers in School 1 strengthened their view of what ESD is through the TPD, the teachers in School 2 did not. The findings on ESD teaching practice go in the same direction. School 1 reports a higher level of ESD teaching at the end of the project while School 2 reports no improved ESD teaching practice. Furthermore, School 1 has made a transformation from normative towards a more pluralistic view of the teaching, while School 2 retained the normative view of teaching also at the end of the TPD. The qualitative results go in the same direction. The facilitator logbooks reveal that School 1 adopts new approaches and updates their view of ESD. They also make changes towards more interdisciplinary teaching. Moreover, the School 1 facilitator describes in the interview that ESD has become a natural part of all the work in the school. Contrary, the facilitator logbooks of School 2 do not reveal any progress related to the teachers’ ESD teaching practice. Instead, the facilitator logbooks and interviews indicate that the teachers struggle with the process of integrating ESD inteaching and learning at their school. To summarize, this study shows that one joint TPD programme aiming to support schools in the transformation process towards ESD results in very different levels of success. Like Gericke and Torbjörnsson (2022 discuss), this could be related to factors inside and outside the school influencing the possibilities of transforming the teaching practice towards ESD. By the time of the ECER conference we will be able to further present possible success factors and obstacles when teachers introduce ESD to their teaching practice.

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