Next, Zachariou and Kadji-Beltran (2022) write about “ESD Competences and Teacher Educators’ Professional Development: Findings and Implications of the Cyprus Example”. They raise an important point: there really aren’t a lot of organised professional development opportunities for teacher trainers (or academic developers). They find that there is a need, articulated by the teachers, for local and international community around the topics. Teachers appreciate working with the Rounder Sense of Purpose framework because it provides structure, but of course, as anything in teaching, it needs to be carefully adapted to the local context.

Oh, and now I’ve already reached part three! Let’s keep going!

Lozano and Barreiro-Gen (2022) develop the “Connections Between Sustainable Development Competences and Pedagogical Approaches”. That is, they mostly refer to their earlier publications — fair enough, I’ll go read them then — where they first do a literature review to connect competences, e.g. systems thinking, interdisciplinary work, etc, with pedagogical approaches like mind mapping, jigsaw puzzles, or placed-based education (Lozano et al., 2017). They also indicate the likelihood of each approach addressing each competence. They determine the likelihood by discussing amongst themselves and with other people, but this isn’t connected to how people actually use those approaches. This is what they do in the next article, Lozano et al. (2019), where they compare the 2017 estimates with results of a survey (see results of survey below). I am reading the book (and thus these articles) mostly because I want to figure out what we can do about our own Teaching for Sustainability here at LTH, so for me the most important take-away is actually the way they have mapped the learning outcomes (or in this case, the sustainable development competences) against the methods they are using, to check which method addresses what. Maybe this is something we can use for courses we are developing, too, and maybe methods then need to be broken down into smaller teaching units — mind mapping can easily be a part of PBL, for example, and PBL might also contain jigsaw elements or literature work. But it is of course important to remember that not every check mark in such a table should carry equal weight. The learning outcomes might not be of equal importance, and they are likely not achieved to the same degree just because a method is likely to address them. But for inspiration, it is nice to have the list of methods and a rough idea whether they might work well for a given task!