Sustainability Across Subjects (SAS)
The project aim was teacher-led curriculum innovation for more sustainable futures.
This project was funded by the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research.
Project lead
- Dr David Mitchell
Team members
- Dr Alison Kitson
- Dr Marian Mulcahy
- Dr Mark Hardman
- Alexis Stones
- Emma Newall
- Leigh Flaxman
- Joy Perry
The overall project aim was teacher-led curriculum innovation for more sustainable futures. More immediately, our objective for this seed funding was to produce case study research evidence for a distinctive cross-subject approach to curriculum innovation for sustainability. This was also an approach for teacher professional development, both in initial teacher education and as CPD for experienced teachers.
Equipping teachers with the tools to develop the curriculum had a double benefit by first, enhancing curriculum quality ‘locally’ (for their students in their schools) and second, as CPD enhancing teacher expertise and agency in their work.
The teachers, both novices and the experienced, were empowered professionally as ‘curriculum makers’ and young people had better access to the powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK) relating to sustainable futures that is being produced by research in the university disciplines.
The approach was to bring student teachers, newly qualified and early career teachers, mentors, teacher educators and academic researchers from different disciplines at UCL together in groups.
Each group developed the curriculum by accessing cutting edge disciplinary research (for example in concepts such as ‘the Anthropocene’ and ‘carbon-neutral’) and recontextualising these for the classroom in innovative ways which are powerful at the local level (i.e., as planned and enacted by the teacher with their students’ needs in mind) whilst encouraging cross-subject collaboration. This last aspect was crucially important as issues of sustainability traverse many subject boundaries and require a holistic cross-subject approach.
The case studies supplied evidence which provided a proof of concept that we could use to bid for funding to extend the project and to support a wider IOE environmental sustainability programme / centre.
There featured a small number of collaborative groups, and these were varied in their makeup – some included student teachers and mentors in different subjects on placement in the same school and others were wider groups who were working and training in different schools. The groups were co-ordinated by the IOE project team of teacher educators.
We planned to research how these groups function by producing case studies. To this end our research question was: 'In what ways can cross-subject, collaborative groups support teacher-led curriculum innovation and professional development for more sustainable futures?'
Our rationale was firstly, that there is an urgent need for education to address global crises of sustainability, following the UNESCO goal 4.7 (education for sustainability) and the UNESCO progress report (2021) calling for rapid educational innovation. Secondly, followed a distinctive approach to using subject disciplines for teacher-led, collaborative curriculum development which the GeoCapabilities project has proven effective.
The research started by bringing teachers and academics together with an event which shares research, ideas, needs and practical problems. Then teachers wrote ‘vignettes’ describing the powerful disciplinary knowledge of a theme. For example, themes can be migration, climate change or inequality in cities. Next, teachers developed practical curriculum materials and pedagogies, taught and finally evaluated their curriculum innovations.
Throughout the process, young people’s voices were included and the teachers are supported by one another and by the project team of teacher educators. The GeoCapabilities project showed that teachers highly value the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded colleagues. The university researchers from the disciplines benefited through the impact of their research.