Education for Sustainable Development

Education for sustainable development is multifaceted and complex, encompassing economic, political, social, cultural and environmental dimensions. It requires us to think very carefully about the type of education system that can nurture individuals with the necessary skills and attributes to face the environmental and social challenges facing Singapore and the wider world in the years to come. The Singapore Green Plan outlines a whole-of-nation approach towards advancing Singapore’s sustainable development goals, wherein the role of schools and educators has been outlined in the Ministry of Education’s Eco Stewardship Programme (ESP). This edition of SingTeach highlights the initiatives that schools like Commonwealth Secondary School, Tampines Secondary School and Mee Toh Primary School have taken to integrate ESP’s 4Cs (curriculum, campus, culture and community) to support sustainability education. The educators interviewed here recognize the importance of both interdisciplinary learning as well as the development of values in sustainability education – seeking a whole-of-school approach that blurs the boundaries between the academic curriculum and co-curricular programmes.

This move towards redesigning how sustainability education is experienced in our schools should be supported by research. To this end, the Sustainability Learning Lab (SLL) at NIE has a mandate to lead in sustainability and sustainability education research, searching for evidence-based understandings of the types of curriculum and pedagogies that support learning for sustainable societies. This issue features the work of two education researchers and members of SLL. Associate Professor Tan Aik Ling’s research demonstrates how an interdisciplinary team of collaborators has sought to understand the impact of immersive learning experiences on students’ motivation to learn and care about the environment, while Dr Johannah Soo has studied food sustainability from the consumer point of view. Both types of research have value in informing how sustainability education can be strengthened in the Singapore education system, with concrete recommendations for curriculum and pedagogy in schools. By extension, such research also implies that there is scope for re-thinking the ways in which we prepare new teachers and develop professional development courses for in-service teachers.

There is much work to be done, particularly in trying to move sustainability education beyond a narrow conception of learning about the natural and urban environment towards developing a sense of individual and collective responsibility towards the environment, ecosystems and societies. The examples in this issue showcase positive steps in the journey towards this goal.

Dr Tricia Seow
Senior Lecturer
Humanities & Social Studies Education (HSSE)
National Institute of Education