The need to develop student sustainability competencies has long been addressed internationally with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1]. Three overall focus points for the sustainable transition of education have been defined in the UNESCO’s new agenda ‘ESD for 2030’: transformative action, structural change, and technological futures [2]. The UNESCO definition of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) combines two complementary approaches ESD 1 and 2 [3]. ESD 1 addresses sustainability issues in the short term. ESD 2 is a more open educational approach that addresses less defined long-term societal future scenarios where goals and needs are less clearly defined and can be changing. ESD 2 is defined as education where students build the capacity to think critically about knowledge, test ideas, and explore dilemmas and contradictions in sustainable living [3]. The defined competencies and pedagogical approaches include action competencies [4], systemic thinking (thinking across disciplines and sectors), social awareness [5], collaboration, critical thinking, and integrated problem solving [3]. Despite sustainability competencies being defined internationally, research stresses that ESD is often not well rooted in the existing school system [6, 7]. It is therefore stressed as crucial to take teachers’ perspective and their everyday teaching practice into consideration when aiming at improving sustainability education in schools [8].

The current paper is part of a larger national research project titled ‘GreenEdTech: Green Transition of Education and educational TECHnology’. Over a period of four years the project will construct educational models and a digital learning space with the goal of implementing ESD into STEAM subjects in upper secondary school education in Denmark. Addressing the described challenge of rooting ESD in school practice is therefore central in the project. The current paper is a systematic review with focus on mapping literature on ESD and Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) integration in upper secondary education from 2018-2022. The study seeks to answer the following research question: How has ESD and ESE been implemented in upper secondary school? Through search and selection strategies, described in the method section, 70 eligible papers was identified and categorised in five categories (numbers in parenthesis indicates number of studies identified in each category): 1. Integration of ESE/ESD in a single formal school subjects (19/70), 2. Cross-disciplinary integration of ESD/ESE cross formal school subjects (18/70), 3. Development of new formal ESD/ESE educations, schools or approaches (14/70), 4. New informal OR cross formal and informal settings ESD/ESE education (8/70), 5. Technology-based spaces for ESD education (11/70).

We found several dominant themes across the different categories. Most frequent was themes with focus on students’ competences, curriculum development, and new types of assessments of ESD/ESE competences. The perspectives on these themes were however dependent on the focus of the category e.g. if the study focused on implementation of ESD/ESE in single subjects or across subjects, or on development of new subjects and schools. As an example, category 1. which included studies with focus on integrating ESD and ESE into single formal school subjects, focus was on development of new didactic models, syllabuses, and curricula for integration of ESD/ESE in a single formal school subject such as chemistry and geography. This both included studies with analysis of curriculum to understand potentials for integration of elements of ESD/ESE [see 9], and redesign of subjects to experiment with approaches to changing content or curricula of traditional subjects. One example of this was design and craft education where potentials for focusing on sustainable materials and design was pointed out [10].

The systematic review process involved defining the scope, inclusion/exclusion criteria, identifying potential studies through keyword-based literature searches, screening abstracts and papers for inclusion criteria, and characterizing articles for mapping through keywords. The following keywords were chosen based on a screening of concepts in primary research articles in the field: “education for sustainable development” OR “environmental and sustainability education” AND school OR “K-12” OR “secondary education” NOT “teacher education” OR “teacher professional development” OR “teacher training”. The search words were chosen to ensure that studies contained a primary focus on education and specifically on education for sustainable development as defined by UNESCO (2008). These search words were applied across the databases: EBSCOhost, Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest. Filters to the searches was applied for searches only to include the following record standards: peer-reviewed work, language limited to English, studies where the keywords were mentioned in abstracts, and records that were primary studies with document types such as journal articles, conference papers or book chapters. Searches were filtered for publication data from a period of five years from 2018 (January 1st) – 2022 (July 5th). The number of records cross databases before removal of duplicates was 815 and was reduced to 385 after removal of duplicates. The abstracts of the 385 records were screened for eligibility applying the following inclusion criteria: 1. Participants: Studies should involve pupils aged 13 – 16 2. Educational context: studies should focus on educational activities in formal and/or informal educational contexts in western countries 3. Content: Studies should contain analysis of ESD practice, design or empirical data of implementation of ESD/ESE in a learning context, and have primary focus on ESD/ESE education 4. Sustainability focus: Studies should have primary focus on climate sustainability e.g. excluding studies with primary focus on inequality or other SDGs in general. 5. Learning situation: studies include involve any subject in upper secondary school in different countries or cross subjects, new subjects developed with focus on ESD/ESE, new schools or informal learning contexts, or technology-based learning environments. 6. Record standard: Records should be peer reviewed full papers in English, contain keywords in abstract, be primary studies, and be conference or journal papers or book chapters. Though a screening applying the above inclusion criteria, 70 studies were selected. An analysis process inspired by thematic analysis was applied to identify the categories described in the abstract [10].

The aim of the current paper has been to answer the research question: How has ESD and ESE been implemented in upper secondary school? Five categories was identified from screening of 70 eligible papers: 1. Integration of ESE/ESD in a single formal school subjects, 2. Cross-disciplinary integration of ESD/ESE cross formal school subjects, 3. Development of new formal ESD/ESE educations, schools or approaches, 4. New informal OR cross formal and informal settings ESD/ESE education, 5. Technology-based spaces for ESD education. The majority of studies belonged to category 1 and 2, whereas category 4 which included studies of ESD/ESE in informal settings had fewest studies. The formal/informal contexts could thus be explored further. Three overall themes were identified across several of the five categories: 1. Development of new educational approaches or curricula, 2. Analysis or development of student competences in relation to ESD/ESE, and 3. Evaluating or developing new ESD/ESE assessment tools. The themes differed dependent on the perspectives of the category. Development of new educational approaches and studies of student ESD/ESE competences has both been researched across subjects and in single subjects, whereas development of new assessment tools often is studied in a cross-disciplinary context. The themes and categories defined in this paper can both be further defined in future studies, but also function as guidelines for designing new ESD/ESE learning environments.

[1] K. Shulla, W. L. Filho, J. H. Sommer, A. L. Salvia. & C. Borgemeister. Channels of collaboration for citizen science and the sustainable development goals. Journal of Cleaner Production. 2020. 10. [2] E. A. Teo & E. Triantafyllou (Ed.) State-of-the-art analysis of the pedagogical underpinnings of open science, citizen science and open innovation activities. INOS Consortium. 2020. [3] P. Vare and W. Scott. Learning for a change: Exploring the relationship between. Education and Sustainable Development. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 1(2), 191–198. 2007. [4] B. B. Jensen & K. Schnack. The action competence approach in environmental education, Environmental Education Research, 12(3-4), 471–486. 2006. [5] J. A. Lysgaard & N. J. Jørgensen. Bæredygtighedens Pædagogik - Forskningsperspektiver og eksempler fra praksis. Frydenlund Academic. 2020. [6] S. Breiting & P. Wickenberg. The progressive development of environmental education in Sweden and Denmark. Environmental Education Research. 16(1), 9–37. 2010. [7] W. Scott & S. Gough. Sustainable Development and Learning: Framing The Issues; London, UK and New York, NY, USA.Routledge. 2003. [8] H. Lotz-Sisitka. An opening dialogue with think pieces and feature articles on learning in a changing world. South. Afric. J. [9] Bruckner, H. K., & Kowasch, M. (2019). Moralizing meat consumption: Bringing food and feeling into education for sustainable development. Policy Futures in Education, 17(7), pp 785-804. [10] Hofverberg, H., & Westerlund, S. (2021). Among Facilitators, Instructors, Advisors and Educators - How Teachers Educate for Sustainability in Design and Craft Education. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 40(3), pp 543-557. [11] Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. References of the reviewed records can be found in this google document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uc9VDI3GrDRKXcQ6iRsdMKOXfkqRjF2Xgg1rqTY5ZWA/edit