Students' Perception about Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Government, International organizations, NGOs, educational institutions and schools are now engaged in various initiatives and campaigns to promote ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) around the world. Along with other stakeholders, higher education institutions across the world are also involved in making contributions towards improvement of sustainability in general and aim at increasing awareness and knowledge of students about social, environmental and economic issues and their complexity. The role of higher education institutions in ESD has been identified by Clugston and Calder (2000, p. 34) as to “help students understand the roots of environmental degradation and motivate them to seek environmentally sustainable practices while also teaching the roots of today’s injustices in full integration with modelling justice and humanness”. Promoting the ESD at higher level is a difficult and complex task. There is no common vision on how the ESD should be integrated into the higher secondary level. While some institutions believe that there should be separate courses/programs on sustainable development focusing mainly on the interactions between human activities and the environment, and their implications for sustainable human development, others support usage of integrated inter-disciplinary perspective throughout the whole education so the present study made an effort to explores how the elements of sustainable development are incorporated into higher education through exploring students' perception of their learning experience about sustainable development.