Supporting local school reform toward education for sustainable development: The need for creating and continuously negotiating a shared vision and building trust

Abstract

This article centers on a local school reform project aimed at implementing a transformative approach to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The study investigates the project in terms of how the design criteria of a continuous professional development program and critical factors of the implementation process influenced the actual teaching practices. Data were collected through interviews with 15 teachers from five schools, and a thematic analysis was conducted. The results showed that the local school reform had limited effect. Trust between school actors, strategic management, and reflexive collaboration appeared to be the most important enablers of transferring the reform agenda into teaching practice. Skepticism, ambiguous management, and local contexts were identified as obstacles, hampering the intended change. A concluding recommendation for implementing transformation oriented ESD through local school reforms and professional development is to add a novel and threefold design criterion to the existing criteria, namely that of creating and continuously negotiating a shared vision and building trust.

Keywords:

• design criteria for teacher professional development
• education for sustainable development
• school reform
• teaching practices
• transformative education

Notes

1 Action competence is here defined as a potential competence that is voluntary and aimed at bringing about a sustainable change (Sass et al., 2020).

2 The rows 1–4 refer to themes, marked in bold, illustrating the four components in transformative ESD, according to Eilam and Trop (2010). The italics indicate how common each component was at each school. The scale is: Dominating, Strong indications, Intermediate indications, Weak indications, No evidence. Rows 5 and 6 refer to the themes (marked in bold), identified as enablers and obstacles for ESD. Normal text indicates local flavor of that theme in the specific school.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by ROSE (Research On Subject-specific Education), Karlstad University and the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (grant 2017-00065).