Education for Sustainable Development from a Comparative Subject Didactic Perspective

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is an approach to teaching that aims to develop students’ readiness to take action for sustainability. In policy and research, ESD is described as a generic progressive teaching approach with a holistic content that includes subject matter related to environmental, social and economic issues. Consequently, ESD is a multifaceted teaching approach, and a question that then arises is how teachers, who are trained in one or a few subjects, can contribute to the different facets of ESD. In this article, ESD is viewed from a subject didactic perspective. Based on empirical studies it is shown how teachers from different subject areas (social sciences, natural sciences and linguistics) understand ESD, and what they can contribute to the different facets of ESD based on their subject traditions. Also, how ESD can be strengthened by relating ESD to subject didactic perspectives based on examples from language and biology teaching is provided. The article argues that different subject teachers possess different competences based on their subject didactic traditions that in combination can lead to greater opportunities to develop students’ action competencies for sustainability compared to general teaching approaches where these disciplinary competencies are not considered.