Competences 4 ESD

AIM

The Competences4ESD project aims to significantly contribute to redefining the key competences of teachers in the frames of 4SDG – Quality Education for all and give a new dimension to ESD through a novel Key Competences Training Model. The project will enable teachers to overcome the educational challenges when called to involve their learners and their school community in discourses of sustainability. It is aimed to empower teachers and equip them with all the ESD key competences needed to lead future generations, respond to the vastly changing world, think critically, and systematically develop values and attitudes for a sustainable future.

THE IDEA

Since the launching of the UN 17 SDGs in 2015 and the SDG-related Education 2030 program of the OECD, the global effort to achieve sustainable development in formal, informal, and non-formal education has been bolstered. Even though international, national, regional, and local initiatives have been taken to support educational communities to follow the pathway to sustainability, there is a concern regarding the effectiveness of the prospective of ESD to educate students to become active agents of change and stakeholders for the future.

The needs assessment carried in all partner countries before we proceed to the development of this project, not surprisingly, revealed that this is the case. Similar to the literature challenges were revealed focusing on teachers’ lack of key competences to proceed to ESD. According to their responses, the general conclusion is that teachers found it difficult to self-reflect on their role to ESD and to think critically on how to teach about and beyond sustainable development issues. 

They felt incompetent and incapable to teach current environmental issues of concern in a holistic and systemic way. They supported that knowledge and skills development is not enough to teach sustainability in learners. It is a matter of having the proper competences in order to become agents of change to lead students and school communities in actions and transformative processes towards sustainability. 

The needs assessment, also, revealed the need for well-structured trainings, programs, and practices for the professional development of teachers in key competence development to build their capacity towards restructuring educational processes and educational communities towards sustainability. Therefore, the partnership reached the conclusion that, key competences development is crucial for effective ESD, and that there are no such training tools for VET trainers to train teachers in key competences development. Therefore, this project comes to meet these challenges through the development of a well-organised training model including innovative tools to efficiently train pre- and in-service teachers on all those ESD key competences that will bring about the necessary transformation to learners and the school community in the frames of sustainability. 

OBJECTIVES

The project Competences4ESD aims to significantly contribute to redefining the key competences of teachers in the frames of 4SDG – Quality Education for all and give a new dimension to ESD through a novel Key Competences Training Model. The project will enable teachers to overcome the educational challenges when called to involve their learners and their school community in discourses of sustainability. It is aimed to empower teachers and equip them with all the ESD key competences needed to lead future generations, respond to the vastly changing world, think critically, and systematically develop values and attitudes for a sustainable future. To this end, having pre-service and in-service teachers as target group, we propose a project with the following specific objectives:

• To gain in-depth knowledge on teachers’ key competence development needs for contributing to sustainable development by the year 2030 (UN 17 SDGs);
• To develop, pilot-test, and validate an ESD Key Competences Training Model for VET trainers to train teachers to meet the current and future needs for quality education for all;
• To support educational efforts in the frames of digitalised and creative training and learning for the professional development of teachers on ESD key competences.
• To assign a key role to teachers to contribute in shaping sustainable development in learners and the school community by promoting and stimulating
• action-oriented transformative learning