Way2ESD: Educating primary teachers for the future: Co-developing approaches to education for sustainable development with in-service teachers

Since the UNESCO Decade for Education for Sustainable development (ESD), many efforts to implement ESD have been made in Luxembourg, including national committees, strategies, and online platforms. Despite those efforts, the current educational report states that there is a lack of policy frameworks for ESD in primary schools (LUCET et al., 2021). A study from Andersen et al. (2021) about teachers’ needs to implement science topics related to ESD shows that only 40% of primary school teachers teach such topics. The study also reveals that they mostly ask for new ideas for activities and hands-on training.
Aiming for a greater implementation of ESD in primary schools, the Way2ESD project elaborates contextually responsive professional development (PD) offers with and for in-service teachers. The case study (Stake, 1995) that will be explored in the proposed presentation uses a sociocultural theoretical framework (Sewell, 1999; Tobin, 2005) to examine how a process of co-construction between teachers and researchers guides the development of PD workshops with a partner school. The analysis of ethnographic field notes (Emerson et al., 1995), audio-recordings and correspondence reveals two central foci that emerged in a participatory design process with the teacher participants. First is that a negotiation about what ESD is, consistently became one of the main topics of conversation. This implies a need for setting a common understanding of ESD in the development as well as in the implementation of the PD workshops. Second is that the holistic approach to ESD allowed for crossing formal/non-formal boundaries, leading to the opening of the PD workshops for the educators of the school. This was welcomed by the school committee and has led to negotiations with the involved institutions to facilitate the access to the PD for educators.
Through this example the proposed presentation will discuss the implications of emergent design processes.