This study seeks to investigate the experiences of teachers working as ESD-facilitators within a whole school approach project designed to implement education for sustainable development (ESD) in their schools. The program activities included school leaders, teachers, and ESD- facilitators. During a period of three school years, five schools in a municipality in Sweden took part in order to integrate ESD in their organization and teaching practice. The ESD-facilitators took part in the design of the development process, workshop activities and content, and facilitated each school’s internal work. This study aims to identify in what ways ESD-facilitators function as sustainability change agents and how contextual factors might contribute to success or form hindrances in their work.

The project was designed based on teachers’ learning and collaborative and reflexive work (Desimone, 2009). The purpose was to direct the development work of the schools towards a whole school approach (Mogren et al. 2019), meaning that ESD is fully integrated in the local curriculum. The main areas of development were to increase interdisciplinary teaching with focus on ESD as holistic pedagogical idea, and that ESD should permeate the work in all levels of the internal and external organization of the school (Sund & Lysgaard, 2013), implying that the different actors in the school and its societal context (students, teachers, school leaders and the outer society) work towards sustainability (Mogren et al., 2019). An additional aim was to integrate pluralistic approaches in the teachers’ classroom practice.

The project included two project leaders, who also participated as researchers in the project. Together with the school leaders and ESD-facilitators, they took a leading role in the development of the project, which included joint seminars, and meetings between project leaders and a) school leaders (across schools), b) school leaders and facilitators (within schools), and c) facilitators (across schools). The ESD-facilitators were intended to function as a link between school leader, project leaders and the teaching staff. They were supposed to support the teacher work teams in their discussions and implementation work with transforming ESD principles into practice.

A recent study by Van Poeck et al. (2017) explored different change agent roles by mapping the different ways in which change agents actively contribute to sustainability. In relation to different roles, various types of learning is being made possible. The authors identified four types of change agents that position themselves in different ways along the two axes of personal detachment vs. personal involvement, and instrumental vs. open-ended approaches (to change and learning). This study investigates the views and practices of the ESD-facilitators in relation to these two dimensions. Thus, different change agent positions may be taken.

The ESD-facilitators have a middle leading role in their schools, which means that they enact leading practices from a position in between the teaching staff and the school leader (Grootenboer, Edwards-Groves & Rönnerman, 2015). There is limited research focusing on practitioners who facilitate processes of professional development (Perry & Boylan, 2018). Thus, little is known about how facilitators, and particularly those who facilitate a whole school approach to ESD, could be supported to carry out their role and tasks in an effective way, and what adequate conditions and arrangements for this might be. Taken together, this implies a gap in current knowledge about ESD implementation strategies, which this study aims to help bridging.

The research questions guiding the research are twofold: in the ESD-facilitators’ descriptions of their roles, functions and practices;

-          What kinds of sustainability change agent roles can be identified?

-          What contextual factors are experienced as successful and/or hindering?

After the project ended, interviews were carried out between November 2020 and April 2021 with seven ESD-facilitators from five different schools. Two of the schools had appointed two facilitators, who either focused on different programs (in upper secondary school) or on different levels in compulsory school (primary or secondary level). The interviews followed a semi-structured approach (Bryman, 2018) and included pre-defined areas concerning the ESD-facilitators’ view on: a) the long term purposes and goals of the project, b) in what ways they viewed their role in the development work in their school, and c) their experiences of factors that were of central importance in order for them to be able to perform their task effectively. Their responses were followed up by the interviewer in a flexible manner. The analysis of data followed a multi-step process. The three parts above constitute the basis for the first step of the analysis, which was performed inductively and followed a broad approach to data driven thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The next step was analyzed deductively, based on the typology of sustainability change agents by Van Poeck et al. (2017). In this step, the utterances connected to the ESD-facilitators’ role in the development work, together with utterances concerning their view of long-term purposes and goals of the project, were analyzed in relation to the four different types of sustainability change agents in the typology. The analysis concerning their role focused mainly on the two dimensions identified as open-ended or instrumental, and personal detachment vs. -involvement. Utterances were identified that could be associated with a specific role description under the four ideal types of change agents. Moreover, utterances of how they viewed the purpose and goal of the ESD development work were analyzed, mainly connected to how different types of change agents may enable different forms of learning (Van Poeck et al., 2017). However, research on middle leading practices as well as research of sustainability change agents emphasizes that roles and practices should be interpreted in relation to the context they are enacted within (Grootenboer, Edwards-Groves & Rönnerman, 2015; Van Poeck et al., 2017). Therefore, the analysis also focused on identifying how different contextual factors affect and enable the roles and practices of the ESD-facilitators. Thus, the final step is to look for relationships between expressed purposes and goals, roles, and what factors are experienced as promoting and/or hindering their role and mission.

The analysis indicates that teachers struggle with transforming ESD theory into teaching practice. The school culture has great impact on the readiness of teacher teams to engage in transformation of their teaching. The ESD-facilitator’ functions and practices are affected by the school culture and whether teacher teams are well functioning or not in terms of collaborative work. All the four roles in the typology (Van Poeck et al., 2017) were identified in their expressions, and different contextual factors were emphasized as either promoting or hindering their functions. Clear support and leadership from the school leader and the presence of a well-defined long term goal was important to provide direction and legitimize the ESD-facilitator role in schools where a broad anchoring of ESD among the staff was missing. Moreover, roles and processes became more open-ended in schools where there was room for collaborative work and reflexive discussions. In those schools where the culture encouraged collaborative work and shared agency, the ESD-facilitators pointed out their functions in mediating the process in terms of initiator, facilitator, mobilizer and/or awareness raiser (ibid.). When there was little space for collaborative work, or the culture was hindering it, the ESD-facilitator role and approach became more instrumental and it became harder to create agency and integrate ESD as a holistic pedagogical idea (see Mogren et al. 2019) among the community of teachers. Those facilitators emphasized their functions in terms of experts, councellors, managers, solution providers and exemplars (Ibid.). A challenge was how to transform ESD theories, which the facilitators expressed as abstract and far from everyday teaching, into concrete practice. In the school where a collaborative culture was present, a way to solve this was to start doing by daring to explore new ways of teaching, and then evaluate in a collaborative, open and reflexive manner.

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