Capturing Transformative Change in Education: The Challenge of Tracking Progress towards SDG Target

Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to ‘ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development’ (UN General Assembly, 2015: 17), thereby calling for transformative educational change all over the world. Target 4.7 offers many opportunities for Ireland, such as: providing legitimacy for development education (DE), Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD); connecting Irish practitioners to a diverse global community of educators committed to social justice and sustainability; and creating a platform to showcase the impact of DE and related educations. However Target 4.7 also throws up challenging questions. What are the ‘knowledge and skills needed to live sustainably’, and who decides which ones are the most important? What sort of education programmes are needed to build the required knowledge and skills for sustainable living and global citizenship? And how will we know if these programmes are working? Irish practitioners of DE and related educations have been working at ways to measure meaningful change in the areas of Target 4.7. These methods aim to balance the need for ‘results’ with the need to do justice to the complex learning that takes place in DE. To move forwards in this challenging area, we need: co-operation and sharing between the various ‘educations’ named in Target 4.7; critical dialogue between the global North and South about the complex nature of global citizenship; recognition that progress towards Target 4.7 requires diverse approaches to outcome measurement; and respectful conversations between practitioners, policy makers and donors, especially in terms of using targets as means of learning and development, rather than as a means of control