Education for Sustainable Development introduced in Formal and Higher Education

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) emphasizes the need to endow learners with knowledge, skills, and values necessary to promote sustainability. It increasingly becoming a core agenda in education globally, especially since the adoption of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. While both basic education and higher education institutions have started incorporating ESD themes into education programs and strategic plans, their implementation is fragmented and primarily in pilot projects. 

Schools struggle with making sustainability models practical in class, and higher education institutions are under pressure to endow practicing professionals with the necessary know-how to bring about a paradigm shift in society and make it more sustainable. Emerging learning paradigms such as experiential learning, project learning, and inter-disciplinary learning present some potential breakthroughs. Yet, studies comparing ESD practices in different levels of education are too limited to date. The current special issue will address these issues.

The objective of this Research Topic is to respond to the existing gap existing between the ambitions within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the current implementation of Education for Sustainable Development in educational systems. While existing global governance frameworks highlight the challenges of developing sustainability education capabilities, most institutions experience difficulty in aligning these policies into coherent learning programs, teaching methods, and institutional commitments. Disconnected programs, a lack of teacher and faculty capacity-building efforts, assessment methods, and a lack of alignment between programs in schools and higher education institutions pose some of the existing challenges.

In order to better respond to this challenge, this Research Topic encourages submissions of innovative educational strategies, evidence-based practices, institutional solutions, and policy analysis with the potential to improve ESD implementation. Through a combination of comparative research, theoretical work, research studies, and case studies, this topic is intended to facilitate the production of knowledge useful in educational curriculum change, teacher capacity building, and students' sustainability learning capabilities. Overall, this topic is meant to fill existing gaps in ESD integration.

The Research Topic embraces all work focusing on integration, challenges, and innovations in Education for Sustainable Development in both school education and higher education institutions. Examples of themes include curriculum change for sustainability, designing and assessing sustainability competences, teacher and faculty education, educational strategies attuned to the 2030 Agenda, education for climate change, sustainability projects in higher education institutions, e-learning solutions for Education for Sustainable Development, and transdisciplinary research projects.