Stimulating ESD Competences of Teachers through 3 level module: Me, my country, our world /Our Common ESD Book Erasmus Project

Project Title

Stimulating ESD Competences of Teachers through 3 level module: Me, my country, our world /Our Common ESD Book

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Energy and resources; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

One of the ways for changing our unsustainable lifesytles to sustainable is education. Thus, teachers are vital actors in motivating young people for changing lifestyles through a sustainable future.UNESCO (2005) declared that there is a need to reorient education to promote public understanding, critical analysis and support for sustainable development. Thus, teacher education has changed substantially and EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (ESD) came into agenda as a new vision.
-With almost 70 million teachers in the world, teachers are holding this great potential to transform societies for a sustainable future.

Therefore, the target group of this study is future teachers in primary and elementary education. In addition to strengthen teachers’ power for a sustainable future:
-Majority of teacher education programs do not include sustainability related content and ESD is not part of teachers’ professional development. For example, according to Turkey’s Sustainable Development Report, 2012; there is a strong need for integrating sustainability into Turkish education system in order to achieve sustainability, to reduce poverty, to increae quality of education and to reach millenium development goals. However, ESD is one of the weak sides of Turkish education system and there are limited implementations, the major reason being a lack of suitable material for teachers.

This project aims to strengthen teachers for changing youngsters’ lifestyles through a sustainable future, by means of creating an innovative, creative, holistic, transformative pedagogical ESD source.
The context of the project is based on creating the source; we call as ESD Book from now on, because this source will be different from the ones created so far.
Through this project an important global need for ESD will be met; an ESD material will be presented for the global use, especially targeting teachers, composed of real stories of unsustainability/sustainability targeting the readers’ cognitive and affective domains for changing their life styles. The innovative feature of the book comes from it is context. It will give the stories in line with the history of the human-nature relationship, beginning from the beginning of the planet to today’s global challenges

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 196665 Eur

Project Coordinator

MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY & Country: TR

Project Partners

• APEC Egitim Danismanlik Ltd.
• UNIVERZA V MARIBORU
• CREDA onlus
• UNIVERSITY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE LBG