Promoting Education for Sustainable Development in teacher education integrating blended learning and digital tools: An evaluation with exemplary cases

Abstract

In the advent of digital era, the integration of technology-enhanced teacher education has been given emphasis along with raising awareness on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This article reports two case exemplars on the delivery of blended-mode curriculum to promote 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) through training courses incorporating different strategies with the intention of providing students with more varieties of experiences related to learning science and mathematics. Facebook and Edmodo were used independently in different learning contexts. Students in the first case exemplar developed critical thinking skill as they justified their opinions in issues raised on Facebook. For hands-on experience, students planned and implemented various sustainability projects in primary schools. Students reported that the revised curriculum delivery strategies based on existing curriculum content helped to prepare them to teach sustainability in the future. In the second case exemplar, teachers were trained in Mathematics digital tools for teaching mathematics and subsequently employed critical thinking when they tried to make origami paper cups with the largest possible volume. In conclusion, technology-enhanced courses on sustainability should be integrated more regularly in both pre- and in-service teacher education to reaffirm the role of teacher as a vehicle of social change in sustainable development.