Education for sustainable development: Impact and blind spots within different routes in Austrian teacher education

Abstract

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is increasingly being perceived as the educational paradigm of our time. Here, teachers act as multipliers in the dissemination of that new paradigm into practice. The question arises, however, as to how far teachers themselves are exposed to ESD issues in their initial teacher training and education. In this exploratory, mixed-methods study, we investigate the exposure of students to ESD-related topics in different routes of teacher education in Austria. We do so by means of a quantitative survey instrument, which was specifically developed for this investigation in a qualitative pre-study. Within the investigated routes we note different distributions of ESD-related topics. These findings serve as a starting point for deeper anal-yses, as well as an impetus to question existing curricula in different teacher education routes with regard to different ESD-related topics.