This is an empirical design study on Education for sustainable development (ESD) that will be presented in an early stage with preliminary result at the ECER conference 2024.

School leaders and teachers play a central role in ensuring that all students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote a sustainable society (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2020). Education for sustainable development (ESD) is a complex and transdisciplinary task for schools and can therefore not be treated as a separate subject but more likely is called for to integrate into all education activities (Holst 2022). In this very urgent task, school leaders and teachers are often left alone without systematic organizational structures and guidelines for implementing ESD. More knowledge and support to both practice and policy decision making is needed. 

There is a growing amount of research on ESD implementation. Most studies are small-scale studies where single levels, subjects, or functions in education have been studied to identify their support functions in implementing ESD effectively at schools (Verhelst 2021). Although it is known that the school organization is vital in supporting daily teaching practice in general (Jarl et al., 2021), there is a lack of studies of how a school organization can support the implementation of ESD (see however Forssten Seiser et al., 2022; Mogren 2019), and how multiple actors in a school organization (e.g., leaders, teachers, and students) covary in this implementation. Especially holistic large-scale studies that enable generalizations are missing (Verhelst, 2021).  

We have, based on knowledge from previous small-scale studies about ESD at individual and organizational levels and a school improvement project in one Swedish municipality, designed a large-scale national ESD study, including school leaders, teachers, and students. Organizational support, structures, and visions for school leaders will be related to visions, work, and needs related to ESD expressed by teachers and reflections from the students. An already existing national database that is unique in its size for ESD will form the basis for the study. Throughout the project we will build on and further develop the concept of a whole school approach in ESD (Wals & Mathie, 2022). The whole school approach to ESD is a concept that is used to study ESD implementation through a lens of general school improvement as part of daily practice. It aims to reveal how the school organization can support ESD implementation, structurally and coherently.  

The aim of our project is to develop systematic and generalized guidelines for how the school organization can support the implementation of ESD. We will study how school leaders organize education and how teachers and students are framed by their local school organizations in their work with ESD. Our first research question is:  

How do Swedish school leaders and teachers from preschool, compulsory and secondary school describe their visions, current work, and needs related to ESD, both individual and in relation to their school leaders and their school organizations? 

This research question is the  start of an iterative research process where factors on school leader level that are supportive for the teachers’ work will be investigated. Further student descriptions of ESD related to school leaders and teachers understanding of ESD will be investigated. Generated knowledge will contribute to  how a concept of a whole school approach to ESD, including school leaders, teachers, and students can be further developed to better describe the effects of the school organization for the implementation of ESD in schools?  

Nationally, this large-scale holistic project will support policy decisions for a wide national implementation of ESD. Theoretically, the project will contribute to further conceptualization and development of the whole school approach in ESD.

The methodological approach of this project is a mixed methods design. The choice of this approach is to acknowledge the power and benefits of both quantitative and qualitative methods (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007). We seek to overcome the dualistic view of studying dynamic and static qualities of ESD implementation by either quantitative or qualitative methods, and instead use the different methods to complement each other in a pragmatic sense to investigate our research question in a diverse and complementary way (Biesta, 2010). We intend to investigate both the static quality of ESD, where a system is striving to achieve defined standards, and dynamic quality that represents what a system needs when ESD implementation proceeds in uncertainty where previously formed standards do not apply (Breiting and Mayer 2015). Method design therefore illustrate how initiative or process are producing specific, criteria or standards, which have both productive and restraining effects (McKenzie et al., 2015). Furthermore, since this project is situated on a school organization level it is suggested to combine quantitative data by school leader´s and teacher ´s providing an overview with qualitative data that additionally include students for concrete examples (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008). We have chosen to structure our mixed methods design as an explanatory sequential design in four steps. The first step consists of a large-scale questionnaire and is thus of quantitative character. Existing register data; school leaders (n > 100) and teachers (n > 2000) are collected by the educational resource The global school (administrated by the Swedish Council for Higher Education 2019-2022 and the Swedish International Development Authority, from 2023 and onward). In this first step we aim to answer our first research questions. In the following steps, the analyses of the questionnaire will provide information for the design of a qualitative follow-up study and thus not only information for the quantitative analysis. We aim to bridge results from the analysis of the questionnaire (both Likert type items and open questions) to qualitative data sampling, in case studies. Adding case studies to quantitative data include focus group interviews. We will, based on the results from the questionnaire, select ten schools representing a variation in emphasis of current work with ESD for more in-depth investigation and analyses. Finally, a comprehensive analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data will be made to answer the fourth research question on creating new models of understanding ESD as a whole school approach.

Previous results important for this project stem from a local school improvement program aiming to scale up the work with ESD in all educational practices within a Swedish municipality. This program serves as an important pilot study for our project. The comprehensive questionnaire used in this study was developed and distributed to all teachers and school leaders. Results from the questionnaires have provided an informative overview of the current ESD work in the specific municipality. In this project we continue the work started in the municipality and expand it to a national level. Experience and results from the local project is vital when scaling up. In ECER 2024 preliminary results on this first scaling of data on a national level will be presented and discussed. Preliminary results for the whole design study building onto the first step is the combination of national quantitative data and case studies in several municipalities that allows for a quantitative validation of a model of whole school approaches of ESD; Scherp school organization model (Mogren 2019). It provides systematic support and guidelines on a general level for implementing education for sustainable development in the whole school organization. The conception of a whole school approach (WSA) to ESD that was previously operationalized in a qualitative manner (Mogren 2019) will here be developed quantitatively to gain theoretical knowledge of school leaders’ and teachers’ views on applying WSA in an ESD context. Furthermore, in this project we will involve students and include their views on school improvement. This is important especially in the context of ESD, where a democratic and participatory approach is emphasized. Previous work with students on ESD has shown what content and methods students prefer (Manni &Knekta 2020) which is why we expect to gain new knowledge here as well.

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