Co-designing Professional Development for Primary Sustainability Education: A classroom pilot

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is recognized as “notoriously complex”, prompting a reevaluation of pedagogical goals (Boeve-de Pauw et al.,
2022). Murphy et al. (2020) identified barriers to implementing ESD in primary education, including a lack of teaching resources, packed curricula, and a need
for supporting teachers in deepening their understanding of sustainability teaching and learning. The presented Way2ESD initiative aims to enhance ESD
accessibility for educators through collaborative professional development (PD) that fosters relational, contextually-responsive pedagogical approaches. The
proposed case study focuses on one step of the co-development process whereby a teacher-leader implemented a co-generated ESD-related topic and
instructional activities in her classroom. The presentation will highlight the teacher’s reflection on the classroom implementation phase, documented through
teacher journals, student products, and video recorded co-development sessions with a member of the research team. The results show that the codevelopment
approach exceeded its main objective of generating a PD workshop, as collaboration with the project team advanced the teacher in her own PD by
serving as a safety net to explore new approaches in her classroom. Implications drawn from the conclusion include highlighting sustainability pedagogical
approaches for use with primary students and approaches for developing sustainability PD with teachers.