Making Sense of Sustainable Development

Abstract

In this chapter, we share results on student teachers’ experiences as participants in a Storyline on sustainable living. The aims of this Storyline project were twofold: firstly, to enhance the participants’ understanding of sustainable development, and secondly to explore ways of practice-oriented teaching at campus. Enacting teaching in academic subject-matter studies provides opportunities for connecting theory and practice and to make ideas and visions for good teaching more explicit. We found that the students expressed that this project gave them opportunities to be creative and to collaborate on “real life-challenges”. The students also pointed to the value of taking the role as pupils and that their own project experiences gave them an increased awareness of how to en- gage school children in topics related to sustainable development. The findings of this study indicate that The Storyline Approach has the potential to promote key features of Education for Sustainable Development. Furthermore, a Storyline project is composed of several core practices of good teaching. Thereby Storyline projects may offer the initial teachers experiences with an alternative to the traditional way of teaching and provide opportunities to reflect on different ways of teaching.