Education for Sustainability

The principles of The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) acknowledge the importance of future-focused issues such as sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, and globalisation. Current global concern about climate change, energy supply, water quality, food availability, and social inequities have acted as drivers for Education for Sustainability within the curriculum.

Education for Sustainability fosters the capacity of people to be informed and active participants in moving society towards ecological, social, cultural, and economic sustainability.

Education for Sustainability (EfS) encourages innovative approaches to curriculum design and review. Pedagogies based on inquiry, cooperative and experiential learning are identified in the literature, in education for sustainability, as approaches that develop a more critical and action-oriented approach to learning for the future. Aspects of these three pedagogies are also identified in The New Zealand Curriculum as approaches to teaching that have a positive impact on student learning.

The New Zealand Curriculum recognises the need to prepare young people for an uncertain future, in which we will need to safeguard and enhance the environment and our place in it.

The Guidelines for Environmental Education in New Zealand Schools recognises there is a range of views on what sustainability means. It also notes connections to the use of both renewable and non-renewable resources and the notions of hauora and rāhui tapu.

It may be said that environmental science and then environmental education had an initial reactive focus when educators began to recognise some of the problems we were facing. Education for Sustainability perhaps indicates a more proactive vision for the future and our role as educators in it.

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