Education for Sustainable Development: A Systemic Framework for Connecting the SDGs to Educational Outcomes

By Vasiliki Kioupi, Nikolaos (Nick) Voulvoulis. Sustainability, 2019

562 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The UN 2030 agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envisions a future of inclusive equity, justice and prosperity within environmental limits, and places an important emphasis on education as stated in Goal 4. Education is acknowledged as a means for achieving the remaining Goals, with sustainability as a goal for education in target 4.7. However, the interconnectedness of the SDGs and the complexity of sustainability as a concept make it difficult to relate the SDGs to educational learning outcomes, with what Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to achieve, left in ambiguity. Using systems thinking, we developed a framework that redefines ESD as a tool that can deliver the transformation required for society to reach a sustainable state. Using the SDGs as end points for this state, and through a participatory approach, education stakeholders and learners work together to construct a common vision of sustainability, identify the competences needed, and develop appropriate pedagogies and learning strategies. The framework allows for the development of evaluation tools that can support educational institutions to monitor and manage their progress in transforming societies towards sustainability.

Subfields: Education, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cad1fde424badb2a34bc0a1de281f4285e78ed3a

How researchers see this paper

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In Education

1. P. Azcárate
2. E. García-González
3. Rocío Jiménez-Fontana

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. P. Azcárate
2. E. García-González
3. Rocío Jiménez-Fontana

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. P. Azcárate
2. E. García-González
3. Rocío Jiménez-Fontana

Citations in the corpus

• Education for Sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals: Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions and Knowledge (2020, methodology): “Those strategies are widely used to integrate EfS [31,32,41] without losing sight of the fact that recent studies stress the importance of conducting further research on their effectiveness because the existing empirical research in this field is still limited [25].”