ESD via Transdisciplinary Teaching Approaches

Education - often seen as being the ultimate way aimed at paving for realization of the high flying visions of sustainability - for implementing sustainability knowledge formation with a character of deep thinking aiming to change and develop everyday acting. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is too complex and challenging for teachers to handle due to its multidisciplinary approach, in particular if focusing learning SD transdisciplinarily. At upper secondary school level, due to the organization and structure of schools from a national perspective with emphasis on measuring and subject matters. Also the global dimensions of ESD get some disapproving attention and are criticized for unsympathetically authorize and give legitimacy to globalization being brought into the curriculum. My focus is on teaching sustainability issues locally with awareness of the balance between the local subjects and the global influences as a whole, and its relations. This empirical study aims at showing how planetary or “global” sustainability education i.e. transdisciplinary teaching could emerge from the separate starting points of EE, SD and ESD in an increasingly globalized world. Research on new settings of educational approaches, has a potential to facilitate real transdisciplinary thinking, seeking to go beyond integration of SD ideas into the curriculum