Complexity as a challenge in teaching sustainable development issues: an exploration of teachers’ beliefs

Abstract

This article reports the results of an empirical investigation on teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning and the globalised world as a teaching subject. Following a qualitative reconstructive approach, the study investigated how teachers’ beliefs and the way teachers address the complexity of sustainability issues relate to each other. Based on 17 narrative interviews with secondary school teachers in Germany, the study reveals patterns of how teachers address the complexity of sustainability issues and how these patterns become visible in the way teachers construct the interconnectedness of the world and in their understanding of teaching and learning. Three abstracted ways were reconstructed from the empirical material: (1) promoting an authentic perspective in teacher-led approaches, (2) focusing on multiple perspectives in fact-based approaches and (3) emphasising reflexivity in addition to multiple perspectives on global issues in student-centred approaches. The article discusses the findings in terms of their relevance to current knowledge about students’ learning processes.

Keywords:

• Complexity
• teaching
• education for sustainable development
• authenticity
• reflexivity
• values

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the author’s dissertation, which has been published as a monograph (Taube 2022a) and a summary (Taube 2022b), both in German. The author would like to thank the funding institutions and all the people who supported and inspired the research process, in particular the supervisor Annette Scheunpflug and the members of the working group: Simone Beck, Claudia Kühn, Caroline Rau, Paula Rüb, Klaus Schröck, Susanne Timm and Alexander Wiernik. The author would like to thank Amanda Habbershaw and Don Watson for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These brackets […] indicate omissions. The omissions are not relevant for understanding the given interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS) and the Equal Opportunity Officer at the University of Bamberg.

Notes on contributors

Dorothea Taube

Dorothea Taube received her doctoral degree in Education from the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg and works there as a scientific assistant at the Chair of Foundations in Education. Her research interests are Global Learning and ESD with a focus on teachers’ professionalisation and didactics, diversity and inclusive education and qualitative reconstructive social research methods.