Teacher Education and Education for Sustainability

Abstract

Teacher education, for at least the last 50 years, has been challenged to engage with a range of social and environmental concerns. We outline here the ways in which teacher education has been repeatedly seen as a key context for facilitating change and reflect on its failure to adequately do so. An overview of the fields of environmental and sustainability education, along with an outline of key policies and strategies, is provided. We also explore what constitutes quality education in the 21st century, and the role that education for sustainability can play in achieving this. We conclude by arguing that, while there have been many efforts and many pockets of good practice, these remain disconnected from one another and have, therefore, not led to broad-scale embedding of education for sustainability in teacher education.