Education for Sustainability programmes need to be carefully planned if they are to achieve the desired outcomes. This section suggests how to go about this planning and provides examples of programmes.
Any good programme depends on effective pedagogy. When planning, keep in mind the Environmental Education Guidelines and the four social science mechanisms: connection, alignment, community, and interest (see: Four mechanisms that facilitate learning in the social sciences).
Encourage students to use their own experiences as a point of comparison when learning about other people’s experiences and worldviews in different times, places, and cultures. The contexts and resources should make diversity visible and avoid biased and stereotypical representations. Students need to feel that what they are learning connects with and values their experiences.
Activities and resources need to be aligned so that students are able to develop understandings of the key concepts and all four aspects of sustainability: environmental, social (including governance), cultural, and economic. The aims of the programme should be made transparent to students. Learning opportunities should not be pre-programmed to the extent that they cannot be changed in response to assessment, and they should provide opportunity for students to revisit important content and processes. Assessment should focus on assessing valued learning, including action competence.
Programmes should be designed to develop students’ interaction skills and use practices that include different abilities and levels of contribution. Tasks and experiences that require student–student interaction are best. Wherever possible, students should be involved in making decisions about their own learning. Students need to be given the opportunity to identify possible roles for themselves, to think critically, and to participate in authentic actions for sustainability.
Programmes should deliberately offer learning experiences that are sensitive to students’ differing interests, motivations, and responses and provide a variety of experiences that become anchors for learning and recall. Local contexts can engage students with the community as well as provide bridges to global issues.
Environmental education involves the integration of three key dimensions:
A balanced environmental education programme addresses all three dimensions.
EfS programmes can be structured in a variety of ways, for example, as linked courses over three full years, as one-year courses, or as short (modular or one-semester) courses. A programme should be flexible enough to allow for students to begin studying EfS at any year level.
EfS programmes can be structured in a variety of ways, for example:
A programme should be flexible enough to allow for students to begin studying EfS at any year level.
Themed approaches could be adopted for the development of an EfS programme.
A themed approach could include application of the four aspects of sustainability to the biophysical environment model, whereby the focus of a programme could be selected from the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere.
All eight learning objectives could be foregrounded in such a programme.
For example:
Alternatively, a themed approach could include application of the four aspects of sustainability to a range of current environmental issues. For example:
Sustainability is about the interrelationship between people and the environment. Students are best able to explore this relationship if they are offered learning experiences that:
Ideally, teachers and students are able to work across learning areas. Teachers will need time to meet and plan together.
Some ideas:
You may find these helpful. These programmes are just examples only.
The principle of coherence (The New Zealand Curriculum, p. 9) states that:
“The curriculum offers all students a broad education that makes links within and across learning areas, provides for coherent transitions, and opens up pathways to further learning.”
Coherence means that students’ programmes (within and across years) should collectively equate to more than the sum of their parts. Nothing should be a dead-end.
For this reason, it is important that teachers identify and emphasise the common threads of learning as well as the unique contribution of their particular subject. The key competencies suggest a means for this.
When designing EfS learning programmes, consider these questions:
Teaching and learning will revolve around key competencies that will support students’ ability to contribute to and expand their worlds.
Last updated April 15, 2021