Implementing education for sustainable development in upper secondary school: A systematic mapping review

The need to develop student sustainability competencies has long been addressed internationally with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1]. Three overall focus points for the sustainable transition of education have been defined in the UNESCO’s new agenda ‘ESD for 2030’: transformative action, structural change, and technological futures [2]. The UNESCO definition of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) combines two complementary approaches ESD 1 and 2 [3]. ESD 1 addresses sustainability issues in the short term. ESD 2 is a more open educational approach that addresses less defined long-term societal future scenarios where goals and needs are less clearly defined and can be changing. ESD 2 is defined as education where students build the capacity to think critically about knowledge, test ideas, and explore dilemmas and contradictions in sustainable living [3]. The defined competencies and pedagogical approaches include action competencies [4], systemic thinking (thinking across disciplines and sectors), social awareness [5], collaboration, critical thinking, and integrated problem solving [3]. Despite sustainability competencies being defined internationally, research stresses that ESD is often not well rooted in the existing school system [6, 7]. It is therefore stressed as crucial to take teachers’ perspective and their everyday teaching practice into consideration when aiming at improving sustainability education in schools [8].
The current paper is part of a larger national research project titled ‘GreenEdTech: Green Transition of Education and educational TECHnology’. Over a period of four years the project will construct educational models and a digital learning space with the goal of implementing ESD into STEAM subjects in upper secondary school education in Denmark. Addressing the described challenge of rooting ESD in school practice is therefore central in the project. The current paper is a systematic review with focus on mapping literature on ESD and Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) integration in upper secondary education from 2018-2022. The study seeks to answer the following research question: How has ESD and ESE been implemented in upper secondary school? Through search and selection strategies, described in the method section, 70 eligible papers was identified and categorised in five categories (numbers in parenthesis indicates number of studies identified in each category): 1. Integration of ESE/ESD in a single formal school subjects (19/70), 2. Cross-disciplinary integration of ESD/ESE cross formal school subjects (18/70), 3. Development of new formal ESD/ESE educations, schools or approaches (14/70), 4. New informal OR cross formal and informal settings ESD/ESE education (8/70), 5. Technology-based spaces for ESD education (11/70).
We found several dominant themes across the different categories. Most frequent was themes with focus on students’ competences, curriculum development, and new types of assessments of ESD/ESE competences. The perspectives on these themes were however dependent on the focus of the category e.g. if the study focused on implementation of ESD/ESE in single subjects or across subjects, or on development of new subjects and schools. As an example, category 1. which included studies with focus on integrating ESD and ESE into single formal school subjects, focus was on development of new didactic models, syllabuses, and curricula for integration of ESD/ESE in a single formal school subject such as chemistry and geography. This both included studies with analysis of curriculum to understand potentials for integration of elements of ESD/ESE [see 9], and redesign of subjects to experiment with approaches to changing content or curricula of traditional subjects. One example of this was design and craft education where potentials for focusing on sustainable materials and design was pointed out [10].