Facing the Future

Abstract

International calls for the immediate implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as an urgent response to the global-scale environmental crises developing from current unsustainable human–environment relationships, face the paradox that educational systems are notoriously slow and difficult to alter. This chapter identifies the educational rhetoric associated with ESD by briefly outlining the 40-year journey from traditional, science-based environmental education to ESD, as it occurred in Australia in response to international recommendations. Important pedagogical responses to changes to the perceived needs and outcomes of environmental education are highlighted, with particular emphasis on the role of pedagogical practice. Effective ESD demands a socially-critical pedagogy, the goals and practices of which represent the antithesis of well-established classroom approaches into which environmental education has been traditionally slotted. Of significant concern is that the calls for educational change will simply contribute to the ever-widening gap between the reality of classroom practices and the rhetoric of education for the environment. The development of the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI) is introduced as an exemplar of the requirement to implement ESD through a socially-critical pedagogy in Victoria. In particular, the current status of ESD is assessed in terms of the ways in which schools and teachers are implementing it, and the need to broaden educational research methods in order to better understand the issues that continue to thwart its effective implementation.