<P><FONT color=#33711E><STRONG>Dieter Gross</STRONG></FONT></P>
Senior Consultant for Sustainable Future Instructions (SFI)
Germany
For more than thirty years Dieter Gross was a teacher trainer, school book author, curriculum designer, and a teacher at a Grammar School in Berlin. He is currently a Senior Consultant for Sustainable Future Instructions (SFI) and a Representative for ESF in the Association of German School Geographers (VDSG e.V.).
In 1992 he led an international research and development project on how to implement Environment Education and ESD in curricula. Within this project he used a tool for designing a Sustainable Development curriculum. His approach has been welcomed for being hands-on and simple to use in the classroom. Recognizing the urgent need worldwide to reform school curricula so as to enable students to have an understanding of sustainability and its relationships, Dieter supports the empowerment of teachers – enabling them to design Sustainable Development curricula by themselves, based on real-life situations and decision-making structures. Dieter first demonstrated this approach at the GLOBE workshop in Boulder, USA, in 1994. Thereafter he has given numerous lectures dealing with the question of how to implement the principle of sustainability in curricula.
Since 2004 Dieter has led a project within the activities of the “German Year in Japan 2005/06 – ESD Curriculum Development project”. Within this project German and Japanese teachers exchanged their ideas on implementing Sustainable Development in education and on designing curricula.