UC Santa Barbara

In the midst of current environmental and social crises we–educators and educational scholars–have been called to prepare our youth with the skills, attitudes, and knowledge needed to face and solve such crises. While mastery of academic content and relevant skills remain key educational goals, teachers need to be prepared and equipped to instruct such content in integration with information on the causes, consequences, and mechanics of local and global sustainability issues; with information on the current innovations to mitigate and solve sustainability issues; and how individual and collective action can be taken. Such learning for social and environmental sustainability can be weaved into formal academics through the alignment of teaching practices and curricular content with the internationally recognized framework of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) My study was conducted with four elementary grade teachers from a public school in the central coast of California. The study involved six phases, from late 2022 to mid 2023, that included the implementation of a professional development (PD) event on ESD, class observations prior and after the PD event, sessions with the participants to co-design an integrated lesson plan, a focus groups, and one-on-one interviews. My data sources largely included field notes and transcripts of audio recordings of the before mentioned phases. I used critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996) to identify the affordances as well as the challenges that participants experienced when attempting to align their instruction with ESD and the forms of collaboration and resources that would support them best to achieve this alignment. Findings from my analysis revealed multiple challenges that the participating teachers faced when attempting to create and deliver lessons that merged subject matter content with sustainability content. Reported challenges included: time constraints on planning and implementation; lack of time and resources necessary for increasing teachers’ literacies about sustainability issues and science education; need for fostering students’ foundational academic knowledge; the dominant presence of a test-score school culture; the preparation received during their pre-service years; and inadequate support from their school district to overcome diverse needs. Moreover, I found that participants expressed the desire for: having access to integrated teaching resources and to sustainability literacy resources; having district-adopted textbooks with integrated transdisciplinary content; and having ongoing support from a sustainability focused TOSA (teacher on special assignment) or coach. Results from my analysis also revealed specific features that a PD on ESD should have to effectively train teachers in the framework’s design methods, learning goals, and pedagogies. These features include the architecture of the PD; the forms of support teachers should receive after the PD has been completed; the elements from ESD that serve teachers to build integrated lessons; and the content and activities that should be prioritized.