The State of Play

Abstract

The Sustainable Schools Program aims to address the goals of Education for Sustainable Development by establishing schools as working models of sustainable communities. In order to effectively achieve this, a school is expected to make significant changes to their operational and management procedures, and teachers and students must develop a learning environment in which they interact through a socially-critical pedagogy. The stories in this chapter document the ideas and practices of ten teachers and two principals from six Australian primary schools committed to the Sustainable Schools Program. These stories highlight the experiences and perspectives of the teachers who were required to implement the socially-critical pedagogy advocated by the program. Together, these stories paint a picture of the state of the implementation of this program, and provide insights into the three main factors of educational practice which underpin the development of the educational rhetoric–reality gaps that thwart efforts to establish effective Education for Sustainable Development:

• Rhetoric—the teachers’ understanding of the curriculum guidance documents related to the SSP and the socially-critical pedagogy embedded with them;

• Reality—the manner in which the teachers were implementing the socially-critical pedagogy of the Sustainable Schools Program; and

• Teachers’ experiences of implementing the Sustainable Schools Program within their school—the relationships between structure and agency in the teachers’ work environments.