ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a higher education eLearning initiative aimed at facilitating authentic connections between educational theory and practice for pre-service teachers who were these studying Australian early childhood learning environments. More specifically, these students were required to create an environmentally sustainable 'provocation' suitable for an early learning environment. The higher education project also fostered students' awareness that working towards a sustainable future requires the ability to communicate in diverse multimodal ways to secure multiple understandings of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Group members shared a range of knowledge and understandings on ESD when designing their provocation and agreed that the collaborative construction of knowledge enabled 'greater learning' than if they had completed the assignment on their own. Notably, the group assignment engendered an enthusiasm for ESD learning, developed critical thinking and fostered independent and collective learning for a diverse student population in higher education.
