Facing Teaching Challenges of the 21st Century: Collaborating with Teachers to Support ESD Pedagogies

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a recent approach that is globally implemented in response to modern challenges such as climate change and social instability. At the same time ESD is “notoriously complex” (Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022) presenting challenges for teachers as it requires a reconceptualizing of the goals of teaching. Drawing on research studies done at the primary levels, Murphy et al. (2020) suggested that there are barriers to implementing ESD which include a lack of pedagogical resources, the perception that the curriculum is too crowded, and a need for increased sustainability knowledge.
One way of supporting in-service teachers to face these challenges is through professional development (PD) opportunities. The Way2ESD project highlighted in the proposed contribution is specifically concerned with designing PD that makes ESD accessible to teachers as a pedagogical approach through collaborative structures that encourage relational, contextually-responsive approaches to our work with teachers. We have developed over time a space in which researchers and teachers co-design and co-teach professional learning opportunities for other teachers. The proposed presentation focuses on one specific step of this co-development process where a collaborating teacher implements co-generated ESD-related topics in her classroom. The research analyzes how this process leads to contextually-responsive content for the later co-taught PD workshop, while also offering PD opportunities for the collaborating teacher and researcher. Data to support this claim is collected through recorded planning and debriefing sessions of the Center team, through reflective journal entries from the collaborating teacher, and through an interview with the collaborating teacher.
Overall this presentation will explore how the collaborative structures of co-design and co-teaching allow for spaces for self-reflection and professional development for the collaborating teachers while co-designing PD workshops for other teachers.