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ESD-Net and Teacher Education

Background
Teacher Education for ESD in the Asia-Pacific region aims to pursue the objective of reorienting education programmes to address sustainability in line with the broad range of national sustainable development priorities in each country. This means linking Teacher Education to ongoing research in pedagogy and curriculum development for a wide range of content including Disaster Preparedness, Climate Change, World Heritage Education, ICTs in education and more.

In May 2006, the UNESCO Bangkok Asia-Pacific Programme for Educational Innovation for Development (APEID) initiated an Expert Meeting on "Reorienting Education to Address Sustainability". The meeting sought to identify the content areas for ESD; to analyze the relationship of ESD with other education initiatives, such as Environmental Education (EE), Education for International Understanding (EIU), Education for All (EFA), the UN Literacy Decade (UNLD) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG); and to recommend guidelines for reorienting existing education programmes to address sustainability in the Asia-Pacific region.

To build on the outcomes of the Expert Meeting, APEID organized a consultation meeting on "Reorienting Teacher Education to Address Sustainability" in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding (APCEIU) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in August 2006 in Penang, Malaysia. This meeting examined key components of EIU and ESD with regards to Teacher Education including policy, curriculum development and the production of educational materials and activities in different national contexts. A key outcome of the meeting was the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Regional Network of Teacher Education Institutes (TEIs) for ESD (ESD-Net).

Asia Pacific ESD-Net
The main goal of the Asia-Pacific ESD-Net is to coordinate efforts by member-TEIs to reorient their curricula for ESD. The ESD-Net works to identify gaps in existing education curricula from an ESD perspective and take action to reorient curricula and teacher education programmes in line with the national sustainable development priorities for each country.

The following action plans are an initial outcome of the first ESD-Net training workshop held in Bangkok, Thailand in August 2007. Action plans are currently being carried out by TEIs in the Asia-Pacific region as part of a larger effort to learn about processes that are locally relevant and culturally appropriate for reorienting Teacher Education programmes to address sustainability in the Asia-Pacific context:

Activities

Sustainable Development Priorities

Related Teacher Education Links - UNESCO Bangkok


Resources
The following are a limited collection of experiences, examples and resources to assist academic institutions in reorienting teacher education programmes to address sustainability. We also welcome additional Teacher Education resources for ESD. Please feel free to contact esd@unescobkk.org for suggested additions to this list.