Tomorrow today; 2010 - unesdoc - Unesco

“...this planet seems to have a very built-up environment”All the cantonal directors of public education 3 have included ESDamong the ten points of their operational programmes.To make best use of the resources available and to support practicalprojects at the national level, the Conference of CantonalDirectors and the six federal offices concerned have joined forcesin an ESD Coordination Conference, which has formulated a set ofmeasures for ESD for the period 2007-2014. To promote the inclusionof ESD topics and contents in primary and secondary schools’curricula, this conference is setting up a specialized ESD agency.As part of this set of measures, an initial programme, which ended in2010, has resulted in the development, reflection on and evaluation ofESD teaching units in the first cycle of secondary school. This involveda double-loop participatory process: taking up the given topic and structure,pilot schools in the German, French and Italian-speaking regionsdeveloped teaching sequences suited to their own circumstances andneeds. Students of eight teacher training institutions then built on thesequences created by the pilot schools, taught them and evaluated themas part of their teaching placement. The results have been published. 4Again, as part of this set of measures, a three-year project is currently inprogress. 5 It creates a network of almost all the country’s teacher-traininginstitutions (primary and secondary). The first aim is to conduct a surveyto provide information on the basic ESD concepts currently promotedin training institutions and their scientific foundations, and on what hasso far been achieved in implementing ESD in the field of teacher training,in terms of projects and implementation. The second stage of theproject, taking this survey as a basis and considering the characteristics ofthe different regional curricula, will involve the proposal of foundationalteaching materials for inclusion in initial and in-service teacher training atall educational levels. The aim of the third stage, based on the work andexperience of the two preceding stages, will be to draw up recommendationsfor introducing ESD into training schemes. These recommendationswill facilitate the task of defining a common concept of ESD and willcontain guidelines on implementation.A process of harmonising the curricula at compulsory levels ofeducation is currently under way in each of the three cultural andlinguistic regions, with the aim of ensuring that ESD features explicitlyin the curricula.Finally, several research teams are working on ESD-relatedissues, in particular: Zurich-based teams (R. Kyburz-Graber and U.Image: © Swiss Commission for UNESCONagel), that of the Interfakultäre Koordinationsstelle fürAllgemeine Ökologie (Interfaculty Coordination Unit forGeneral Ecology) in Bern (http://www.ikaoe.unibe.ch/forschung/) and, at the University of Geneva, the teamof the Science Teaching Laboratory (Laboratoire dedidactique des sciences/LDES) (http://www.ldes.unige.ch/rech/DD/dd.htm) and the team involved in researchin the Teaching and Epistemology of the Social Sciences(Recherche en didactique et en épistémologie des sciencessociales /ERDESS) (http://www.unige.ch/fapse/didactsciensoc/recherche.html).Challenges still to be facedGlobally speaking, ESD has very different connotations,depending on whether one views it from the perspectiveof a country of the South or of a more well-offcountry of the North. In the South, the issue is also oneof achieving the Millennium Development Goals, one ofwhich is to make primary schooling available to everychild by 2015, and to reduce the flagrant inequalities inaccess to education between rich and poor, and betweenboys and girls. At the same time, there needs to be areworking of study programmes and activities with aview to alleviating poverty, eradicating HIV/AIDS andraising awareness of environmental issues.In the richer countries of the North, the DESD is anopportunity to give schools and the education systeman emphasis less narrowly geared to training youngpeople to perform effectively in the labour market.However, there is considerable tension between thisobjective and the demands of an economic and politicalsystem that often requires early selection basedsolely on cognitive knowledge in a few disciplines. ESDraises, for example, the whole question of the place ofart and social sciences in the curriculum, or the importanceof teaching pupils to participate in collectivedecision-making. It challenges the teacher to enable thelargest number of their pupils to develop such valuesas responsibility, and concepts such as the commondestiny of all the human beings who inhabit our planet.The recent Bonn Conference 6 showed that the DESDis leading us into a totally new area, given that its aimsare not as clearly defined as those of other programmes.For example, the first survey carried out at a global levelreveals considerable tension in the richer countries ofthe North: some participants want to grasp the opportunityprovided by the DESD to introduce major reformsof the education system as a whole in order to bringabout profound changes in learners’ basic values; others,meanwhile, would stick to opening up just a few areas oflearning and of awareness-raising. We see the same thingin Switzerland: some people believe that ESD concernsschools and schools alone, and within this context onlybiology and geography teachers. But is it not rather anopportunity for all of us who are involved in educationto ensure that learners in the classroom, in schools, inassociations or in our neighbourhoods acquire the skillsneeded by citizens called upon to implement the principlesof sustainable development?[ 88 ]