Competences for education for sustainability: analysis of educational policy documents in Portugal

Abstract

The present study is part of the TEDS - Teacher Education for Sustainability project. This is an Erasmus+ project and involves five European countries: Portugal, France, Lithuania, Finland and Malta. The main aim of the TEDS project is to provide   European teacher educators and   teachers with the knowledge and tools necessary to implement an education that promotes sustainability in their practices. Within this project, one of the objectives was to understand how key competences in education for sustainability are present in the educational documents of each of the participating countries. This article refers to the analysis carried out on Portuguese educational documents. It is a qualitative study framed on the interpretive paradigm. It is an exploratory, descriptive-interpretive study aimed at identifying and describing the main characteristics related to the key competences in education for sustainability present in the official Portuguese documents that guide teaching and learning. After the analysis, validation and discussion of the results of the content analysis carried out on the corpus, these seem to indicate that the educational documents analyzed are compatible with the key competences considered in the guiding reference framework. All documents present different aspects of the various competences, highlighting their importance in the foundation of an educational practice that promotes sustainability.