Education fosters hope and gives the courageous a chance. More and more people are recognising that climate change, resource scarcity and species extinction are changing the world through our actions: sustainably. But how does sustainability arise in educational processes? And how do I teach sustainability?
The ESD BOX is online! The project aims to facilitate ESD in schools by providing a collection of specific teaching units. It is primarily aimed at teachers.
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The ESD BOX contains materials that can be used to incorporate ESD into subject teaching in a discursive manner. The didactic bridges between the various subjects, which are by no means trivial, are highlighted and linked to suggestions with sample methods. The ESD BOX shows ways, ideas, and suggestions for your specific subject teaching and supports your agile design skills. At the same time, the teaching units and sample methods in the ESD BOX integrate the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations in its 2030 Agenda in various ways.
This approach is supplemented by the ESD BOX Plus, which provides insights into real classrooms and documents ESD lessons that have already been taught. As part of training and continuing education, the corresponding teaching films (integrated into a digital video portal) can be analyzed and reflected upon. In doing so, the ESD teaching skills of teachers (and also learners) should be considered.
Education for sustainable development aims to encourage people to engage with the world in a comprehensive and holistic way. Since the 1950s, the constantly changing relationships between humans, nature and the environment have been subject to an enormous acceleration process, which has had significant ecological, social, economic and cultural consequences. The teaching materials collected here draw attention to the relationships between humans, nature and the environment and encourage deeper reflection. One of the challenges of the 21st century is to transform the relationship between humans and nature in such a way that both the ecological crises of our time and global injustice are mitigated. This primarily involves exploring opportunities for sustainable development through critical reflection on the traces of the past.
Here you will find teaching ideas. (unfortunately only in German)
The method patterns attempt to address two aspects: On the one hand, they offer a formal template that focuses on a discursive approach. The teaching units always include examples of how we have filled this method pattern with content. Secondly, the method patterns invite you to further develop and redesign the formal framework in other subject contexts.
Do you like a teaching method, but would like to change the content? Then you can find all the details about the method under the Method Patterns tab to complete the teaching unit with your own materials.
A look inside the classroom
The use of lesson recordings in university teaching formats makes a direct contribution to professionalisation and serves to improve the quality of practical relevance in teacher training. This is because videos are important stimuli for (self-)reflection. They open up the possibility of thinking beyond the step from knowledge to action (Anselm/Werani 2017). In addition to theoretical elaborations, digital lesson recordings and their transcripts enable an integrative approach. To this end, it is essential to take a look inside the classroom. This allows the challenges of a moralising teaching culture to be addressed and, above all, promotes the ESD competencies of teachers.
Research into this topic is currently being conducted as part of the ESD-BOXplus project (funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the ViFoNet network (video-based training modules for digitally supported teaching).
ESD is associated with high standards. For example, the UN postulated as its vision for the World Decade (2004–2015) that ESD should ‘open up educational opportunities for all people [...] that enable them to acquire knowledge and values and learn behaviours and lifestyles that are necessary for a future worth living [...]’ (DUK 2011, 7). Accordingly, the materials in the ESD BOX aim to empower children and young people to shape their own development – and, by extension, social and global development – in a sustainable manner. This should give them the opportunity to acquire the values, knowledge and skills necessary for shaping their own lives and society in a sustainable manner (cf. ibid.).
The ESD BOX therefore promotes sustainability knowledge that is integratively conceived from the subject didactics about the global ecological, socio-cultural and economic interrelationships and the various problems that require action in the sense of sustainable development. This knowledge is linked to an understanding of the interdependent relationships between global, regional and local structures and processes (cf. Hoiß 2019, 34).
The materials in the ESD BOX primarily focus on the acquisition of so-called design skills. The term “design skills” was coined in the 2000s by educational scientist Gerhard de Haan to systematise the facets of a comprehensively conceived ESD for teachers and learners on the one hand, and to make them operational on the other. The aim is therefore to help gain an overview of the requirements of ESD and, at the same time, to enable its intentional and well-thought-out implementation in a wide variety of learning environments.
Specifically, acquiring design skills has two aspects: First, it is about knowing how children and young people, but also adults, can promote sustainable development processes and how they can recognise processes that are not sustainable or less sustainable. Secondly, people are guided and encouraged to acquire and reflect on values and skills that motivate them to act sustainably and enable them to become active and effective in promoting sustainable development, both independently and with others (cf. DUK 2011). At the same time, the teaching units and methodological patterns of the BNE-BOX integrate, to varying degrees, the 17 global sustainability goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations in its Agenda 2030.
Based on the ESD design competencies in Gerhard de Haan's categorisation (2008), competencies for learners in the areas of subject-specific, social and personal skills were first formulated for implementation in the materials. The aim is not for each teaching unit to cover all these aspects. Rather, they serve as a guide for teaching activities with a special focus on ESD: the learner competencies were expanded in the ESD BOX to include teacher competencies that enable discursive and value-reflective ESD teaching. The following graphics provide an overview of the ESD competencies for learners and teachers.
Visit it anytime at www.bne-box.de.
The ESD BOX is a collaborative project with the Research Centre for Values Education and Teacher Training at LMU Munich.