ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how sustainability issues bring about specific challenges for teaching. The authors highlight the need to move beyond traditional ‘schooling’ practices and formulate five principles for designing sustainable development teaching: (1) create engagement for the content of teaching, (2) use the right focus for the teaching, (3) deal with local sustainability problems, (4) stress pluralism and (5) include ethical and political dimensions. These principles are based on a pragmatist, transactional didactic theory that understands learning and teaching in terms of action. Learning is approached as a process of meaning-making that takes into account both prior experiences and the specificity of a particular learning situation and that results in a more developed and specific repertoire for coordinating activities with the surrounding world. It is about extended possibilities to act. A vital aspect of learning is inquiry, which involves both action and reflection as inseparable activities. This perspective on teaching and learning makes it possible to stress pluralism and the ethical and political dimension of sustainability issues without falling into an anything-goes attitude.
