How can ESD enhance your teaching skills
and strategies?
ESD enables teachers to focus on the process of teaching, as well as
the content of the curriculum. Like sustainable development itself, ESD
is a journey: the teacher and pupils become part of a community of learners
making choices about paths to the future.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin 1970 & 1993) talks
about "co-intentional education" leading to "not pseudo-participation,
but committed involvement":
"Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality,
are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and
thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that
knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection
and action, they discover themselves as permanent re-creators."
Teachers and pupils engaged in ESD will be involved in Action Research
(defining a problem, making an action plan, trying it out, evaluating
it and trying again until the problem in solved as the solutions are not
necessarily in textbooks but we are helping to create them.
The Learning for Sustainable Cities project has been developing a series
of case studies about young peoples’ involvement in making their
school, neighbourhood and city more sustainable. These case studies are
for educators, and anyone interested in sustainable development, to use
and hopefully learn from. They are also 'works in progress' to be commented
on, with the possibility of dialogue about how you might be approaching
problems and solutions in different ways.
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