Identifying Key Issues of Education for Sustainable Development

Peter Glavič
Additional contact information
Peter Glavič: Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Maribor, Smetanova 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 16, 1-18

Abstract: This paper elaborates and presents key issues established for a course on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). ESD is supported by the United Nations (UN) organization and its agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Quality education is also one of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The evolution of sustainable development and ESD is overviewed first in order to define the most important content of ESD in future teaching. Because of the fast development of humankind in all the SD pillars (economic, social and environmental), the climate crises as well as the new technologies and knowledge emerging, education leaders and teachers are lacking modern and effective content for ESD. Therefore, twelve key issues of ESD are identified and elaborated in the present article. The issues are organized into four groups (approach, contents, teaching, and organization) with three items each. The approach is including ESD scope, policy, and cooperation, the contents part deals with the three ESD pillars — environmental, social and economic; the third group, teaching, regards ESD methodologies, transformative teaching and learning, and capacity building; the organization group presents ESD metrics, documents, and institutions. The twelve issues have been synthesized after reviewing the available literature, enhanced by the participation in several international projects on education. In addition, they were further elaborated from feedback obtained from three international conferences focused on education for sustainable development, social responsibility, and sustainable consumption and production. The key goals suggested by the audience of the international conference in Vienna were holistic education, stakeholders’ awareness, participation and cooperation, and building capacity of stakeholders, while the challenge was found to be the timely evolution of human society towards the deep transformation. This paper is an informed perspective proposing content for an Education for Sustainable Development course.

Keywords: education; sustainable development; key issues; deep transformation; principles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6500/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6500/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:16:p:6500-:d:397863

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().