Abstract
High-quality education can be a core catalyst for the changes required to achieve all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); it has the potential to contribute significantly to health and well-being, gender equity, better quality of life, and ecological sustainability. Against this background, our research aims to discuss key lessons for building Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESD) practices in higher education as observed by country-based researchers from Barbados, Portugal, and the United Kingdom (UK) that are all part of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe. All these countries advocate for a practice-oriented and socio-critical approach in ESD that aims to promote ecological literacy and a good understanding of equity and social justice. An online questionnaire was used for data collection; we use this data as the basis for suggesting key lessons for creating and strengthening ESD practices in higher education that all stakeholders.
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Notes
- 1.
Context-based teaching strategy involves teaching concepts, ideas, and principles by using real-life contexts to connect to students’ lives in the real world. Cooperative group discussion-based learning involves methods, such as Fishbowl and Jigsaw, to stimulate peer group discussion skills and the comprehension of complicated ideas or texts. Debate/dialectic-based teaching involves stimulating collaboration between students to critically think about and discuss propositions to complicated world issues, thereby enhancing students’ application of critical examination, questioning, and self-reflection skills. Demonstration involves methods where teachers’/students’ communication of ideas, concepts, and complicated topics are supported by, for example, graphs, flip charts, whiteboards /blackboards, and PowerPoint, to enhance understanding and to make connections to practical world issues. Guided discovery or exploratory teaching involves using methods for solving problems by using active participation from students in exploring and discovering new knowledge. Peer education involves using methods based on student partnerships, such as peer support, peer assessments, or discussion seminars, through which students help one another in building understanding and knowledge. Action-based teaching is a teaching methodology contributing to solve societal problems, that is, a whole student approach focusing on what teachers and learners do and say while engaged in meaningful learning activities. Project-based teaching involves giving students opportunities to study a challenging problem, engage in sustained inquiry, find answers to authentic questions, help choose the project, reflect on the process, critique and revise the work, and create a public product. Co-creation-based teaching involves a process by which students collaborate with teachers in a participatory design of their own learning experiences.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the support received from the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) to conduct this international research project. We want to acknowledge the support received from Ms. Mariagrazia Tagliabue (ATEE Head of Office) and we are grateful for the partnership that was established with the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology. We are grateful for the contributions made by Mr. Henderson Nurse, the acting Principal at Erdiston Teachers Training College, Barbados. We are grateful for the teachers in Barbados, Portugal, and the UK who participated in the research. We also want to express gratitude to Mauran Pavan for his graphic design contributions to this chapter.
This work was partially financially supported by Portuguese national funds through the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) within the framework of the CIEC (Research Center for Child Studies of the University of Minho) projects under the references UIDB/00317/2020 and UIDP/00317/2020.
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Bijlhout, D., Vilaça, T., Chewitt-Lucas, R. (2023). Best Teaching Practices in Environmental Sustainability Education: A Cross-Country Comparison. In: Walker, T., Tarabieh, K., Goubran, S., Machnik-Kekesi, G. (eds) Sustainable Practices in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27807-5_3
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