Despite the significance of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), ESD implementation faces challenges, especially economic obstacles in a global world. This study explores the drivers and barriers to ESD implementation at two Swedish business and management schools (BMSs). Using a qualitative multiple-case study design, we explored institutional support and faculty engagement through semi-structured interviews with 15 faculty members. The findings revealed a strong faculty-level commitment to ESD with key drivers including personal commitment, institutional mandates, and collegial influence, reflecting a blend of top-down and bottom-up engagement. However, both schools were challenged by practical implementation barriers and ambiguities in defining sustainability. It shows the need for clear policies, tangible resources, and tailored pedagogical models to overcome implementation challenges. Isomorphic tendencies and policy divergence were found, which offer valuable guidance for institutions aiming to advance ESD initiatives, highlighting the importance of balancing institutionalized approaches with academic autonomy in integrating sustainability.

This chapter reflects on the contribution of science education by means of socio scientific issues (SSI) to global citizenship education and education for sustainability from a Swedish research perspective. The relation between what science inquiry and moral inquiry may entail in SSI for educating our future citizens is discussed. We argue that equipping citizens not only with factual knowledge, but also training them to act with moral reflection, has become an even more important goal for education due to the current planetary emergency. Ethics/morality are of special importance for SSI argumentation, but research is still limited concerning how people’s knowledge, value and personal experience are related to ethics/morality in SSI argumentation and how moral inquiry can be further enhanced through education. The chapter is composed of three main parts. First, SSI related research, practices and policy in Sweden are briefly presented. Second, two empirical studies from Sweden are presented as examples to further reveal the complexity of people’s knowledge, value and personal experience in relation to science and moral inquiry. Last, a didactic model for science and moral inquiry via SSI is presented to promote reflective and responsible citizens for sustainability and Bildung globally. In the chapter, science and moral inquiry are seen as intertwined in SSI education, as two entities which presuppose each other like the Yin and Yang in Daoist Chinese philosophy.

Objective of the article: The aim of this article is to synthesise the findings of relevant research articles and to demonstrate several “didactic models” of education for sustainable development (ESD) in school education.

Research method: The method of narrative literature review was used to identify didactic models for ESD in school education.

A short description of the context of the presented issue: The term didactic refers to the professional scholarship of teaching. In recent decades, the need to develop didactic models that would support school teaching and to allow for this adjustment in new teaching contexts has been addressed. Research has shown that school subject teachers work differently with ESD. It demands holism and pluralism, which requires embracing multiple stakeholders and communities, and a multi-disciplinary approach. Shedding light on achieving sustainability with its holist and pluralist features, this article analyses relevant research articles and demonstrates several “didactic models” for ESD in school education.

Conclusions and recommendations: I propose socioscientific issues-based teaching and learning (SSI-TL) as a useful didactic model for ESD and argue for the need to embrace didactic models like SSI-TL in teacher professional development for both pre- and in-service teachers. The article explicitly considers the value of applying Communities of Practice as a theory to guide educational practices and research on education for sustainability in school science. The implications of applying the didactic models presented in the article are relevant not only for ESD, but also for students’ development of Bildung to become reflective and responsible citizens.

Education for sustainable development (ESD) has for decades been a focus internationally and has been embraced in the Japanese curriculum since 2008. Given UNESCO’s emphasis on teacher training for ESD and well-established in-service teacher training programmes in Japan, the aim of this study is to explore whether ESD teacher training could help Japanese in-service teachers to implement ESD in school. Semi-structured individual interviews with 12 in-service teachers from primary to lower secondary schools were conducted via Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was found that in-service teacher training for ESD had a positive impact on transforming the teachers in both their professional and personal lives. However, challenges remain regarding the promotion of ESD in schools because of lack of common ground with other teaching colleagues and time constrains. The implications of implementing global ESD in schools are discussed.

In recent decades, socioscientific issues (SSI) have been emerging from the interrelationship between science, technology, and society. For example, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, related decisions, like whether we need to ask people to use facemasks, is an SSI question being discussed internationally with no right or wrong answer. Controversial issues like SSI and the ability to make informed decisions need to be taught in school, which raises the question of whether teachers themselves are equipped with the skills required to make decisions on SSI. This study aimed to explore whether primary science pre-service teachers could consider multiple subject areas while making decisions on SSI in the context of abortion. Forty-two pre-service primary science teachers (third-year university students) in a genetics and biotechnology course participated in the study. The participants were asked to make decisions about abortion in three genetics-related scenarios and to explain their reasons in written reports. The SEE-SEP (science, environment, ethics/morality, sociology/culture, economy, and policy) model was adopted to explore the reasons behind the pre-service teachers' decisions. The results showed that their decisions were influenced mainly by science and ethics/morality subject areas. The results further revealed that the participants who supported abortion based their decisions on both scientific evidence and their emotional responses. On the other hand, the pre-service teachers who were against abortion based their decisions on scientific evidence and the aspect of uncertainty. Accordingly, our study recognises the importance of including both science and ethics/morality discussions in SSI-based teaching. The implications for SSI-based teaching and learning are discussed.

Equity is an important topic in school context globally because international migration is rapidly diversifying schools and classrooms across the world. Teacher quality is seen strongly related to student outcomes than demographic characteristics of students, and therefore important for achieving equity. This explorative study investigates the extent to which Swedish and Dutch pre-service teachers (PSTs) understand equity and are prepared to implement equity in their practice. Qualitative method was conducted in the study. Data from semi-structured interviews with 15 PSTs from Sweden and the Netherlands was thematically analysed to examine teacher knowledge about equity in education and related dispositions. The results showed that, while Swedish pre-service teachers had more theoretical knowledge in relation to teaching for equity, Dutch pre-service teachers had more practical knowledge and were therefore more prepared to implement equity in their lessons. The study recommends that teacher professional development for both in- and pre-service teachers needs to pay more attention to how equity is taught and how teachers embody equity principles in their practice.

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to struggle with armed conflicts, creative and ethical solutions to the controversial issues of recent years are needed globally. While creativity is necessary, it must also be ethically sound. Today, discussing creativity in relation to its ethical dimensions has also been emphasized in the perspective of sustainable development, but research on the teaching and learning of ethical creativity remains limited. Therefore, the aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to describe how primary schools engage students on ethical creativity and 2) to suggest a didactic model for ethical creativity based on the teaching strategies found in a literature review. Internationally, creativity and ethics have been addressed in curricula and studied within the field of education. However, research on the ethical dimensions of creativity (ethical creativity) is limited. Based on a literature review, five teaching strategies for engaging primary school students on ethical creativity have been identified. The common features among the five teaching strategies relate to the use of 1) digital tools/media, 2) art and literature, 3) real problems and dilemmas, and 4) enquiry-based learning. A three-step teaching model is suggested for teaching ethical creativity. The implications of the paper relate to enhancing ethical creativity among our children, who are both future citizens and leaders in various professions in the global society.

Over the past few decades, school choice has been a widely debated issuearound the globe, following the development of pluralism, liberty, anddemocracy. In many countries, school choice systems were preceded by res-idence-based school assignment systems, creating a strong connection be-tween a neighborhood and its schools’ demographic compositions. However,schools often remain highly segregated. School segregation is thus seen asa major problem and is supposedly driven by three main factors: residentialsegregation, parental school choice, and schools’ selection of pupils. Thispaper aims to shed light on what research should be focusing on as regardsschool choice and residential segregation with the following two researchquestions: What are the links between neighborhood and school choice inthe literature? How are neighborhood and school choice connected toschool segregation in the literature? Two main findings emerged: (1) theneighborhood-based social networks that parents developed had limitedtheir school choices and (2) neighborhood segregation is one of the most important factors that contributes to school segregation and is related to multi-ethnic and socioeconomic contexts.

Due to the increase of economic immigration over the last few decades, South Korea has rapidly become a multi-ethnic society. The number of students with a multicultural background (SMBs) has increased more than tenfold in the past ten years. Research has revealed that despite physical inclusion of SMBs in general classrooms, SMBs tend to struggle at school as a result of language difficulties, academic underachievement, and social isolation. Shedding light on the Salamanca thinking, this study aims to investigate how teachers’ experiences of SMBs vary according to school cultures. Thirteen teachers from three schools (with different school cultures) were invited to participate in qualitative semi-structured interviews. It was revealed that the teachers, who worked in the different school cultures, expressed differently with regard to (1) teachers’ reasoning about SMBs’ struggles, (2) teachers’ professional knowledge and strategic practices, (3) collaboration with a multicultural education supervising teacher (MEST), and (4) dependency upon external support. The school judged to be contributing to ‘true’ inclusion was characterised by ample support from a MEST and the creation of an inclusive learning environment for SMBs as a whole-school approach. What can further ‘true’ inclusion of SMBs in elementary schools and the implications thereof are discussed.