A Rounder Sense of Purpose

Championing a socially and environmentally sustainable form of development has implications for both what is taught and the way that education is conducted. These two sides of education for sustainable development (ESD) have been described by Vare and Scott (2017) as ESD 1: promoting informed behaviours and ways of thinking and ESD 2: building capacity to think critically about and beyond sustainable development concepts. While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer the educator content and context (ESD 1), they cannot in themselves develop educators who have the competence to facilitate critical ESD and global citizenship (ESD 2). A Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) is a three-year, EU-funded project developing an accredited framework of competences. This is being tested through bespoke educator training programmes among approximately 400 pre-service and in-service educators in six European countries. This work draws on the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe framework of educator competences for ESD (UNECE 2012), which itself made reference to an earlier system of teacher competences (Sleurs 2008). The UNECE framework remains a largely theoretical tool that has not been implemented in a way that links its 39 competences to assessable learning outcomes. Since early 2016 RSP partners have worked on ‘distilling’ the UNECE competences, i.e. reducing the number, removing repetition and identifying gaps. This was done with reference to other significant work in the field including that of Wiek et al. (2011) which has been adopted by UNESCO (2017). In presenting the RSP competence framework we argue that this represents a pedagogy for transformation. As such it addresses the need for ESD 2, providing a counter-balance to the more familiar ESD 1 approach that would be supported by exploring the content of the SDGs.