Undervisning för hållbar utveckling : Förskollärares uppfattningar och beskrivningar av variationer på undervisning: innehåll, aktiviteter och den egna rollen

The aim of this essay is to contribute to knowledge about how teaching for sustainable development (TSD) in a preschool context is understood by preschool teachers. The new curriculum for early childhood education (ECE) in Sweden, Läroplan för förskolan Lpfö 18 (Skolverket 2018) addresses sustainable development for the first time explicitly as part of the ECE program, with all three dimensions (environmental, social and economic) included in the description. In a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews and with inspiration from phenomenographic method, this essay is focused on preschool teachers various views on their own teaching practices regarding sustainable development. Considerations of ethic matters such as confidentiality and informational consent were taken. We built our analysis upon to what extent the three dimensions of sustainable development; environmental, social and economic, were included in the teachers expressions. What kind of content and activities were expressed as a part of their TSD and how they described their own teaching role were explored. Three different teaching roles were identified through the material. Together with teachers descriptions of content and activities, these were subsequently related to the teaching traditions; fact-based, normative and pluralistic, as described by Öhman and Östman (2004). This as the third and last step in our analysis. The result shows a variation of teaching roles, content and activities, where the three dimensions as well as the teaching traditions are sometimes overlapping. Conclusions and implications are discussed