Education for Sustainable Development: How to Integrate in School Education (Hardbound - 2021)

United Nations’ Agenda 21 was the first international document that identified education as an essential tool for achieving sustainable development (SD) and highlighted the areas of action for education in this regard. Different approaches to ESD encourage people to comprehend the complexities of issues threatening planetary sustainability and adopt sustainable, rather than damaging practices.

The book is an attempt to integrate the concepts of ESD into the existing curriculum followed by adopting various strategies and activities to transact the same in the course of study. A curriculum has been developed by integrating the concepts of sustainable development into science and social science of VII standard of NCERT syllabus and designing various pedagogical strategies. The contents and activities developed have been validated with the help of experts.

The book is the result of a painstaking study whereby the experimental group was taught using the integrated ESD approach, while the control group followed a traditional approach. The findings revealed that the integrated approach to ESD has helped in increasing awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving and participatory behaviour towards SD. The important findings that form the basis of the book are that the integrated approach to education for SD is effective in improving the knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving on SD among upper primary school students; there is no significant difference in knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving and value preference on SD among upper primary male and female students; there is no significant difference between the value preference on SD of students in the experimental and control group; and there is a significant difference in critical thinking and problem-solving of high, average and low knowledge students of experimental group.

The contents and strategies given in the book are practicable in real classroom situations. It will be useful for all those concerned with the framing of curriculum on SD at upper primary level.

Dr. Jubilee Padmanabhan completed her postgraduation in Botany from Govt. Brennen College, Thalassery in 2002, and was a gold medalist. She did her Masters in Education in 2005 and obtained a Ph.D. degree in Education in 2012 from University of Mysore.

Dr. Jubilee is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Centre for Education at Central University of Punjab, India. She also worked as Head of the Department of Education at Hindupat Institute of Teacher Training and has undertaken projects in collaboration with Columbia University, New York. She has the experience of teaching Education to B.Sc., B.Ed., and M.Ed. students. She is also guiding Ph.D. as well as M.Ed. students in their dissertations.

Her areas of interest are Science Education, Assessment for Learning, Environmental Education, and Curriculum Development. She has presented papers on various topics relating to education in national and international conferences. She has published 20 papers in various journals and books. She has edited two books on “Dynamics of Education” and “Innovations in Education”. She has also acted as resource person in different national level institutions for developing curriculum for B.Ed., M.Ed., B.El.Ed., M.A. Education, and also in developing handbooks and resource materials in Education.