Challenges of adopting education for sustainable development approaches in higher education: Views of Egyptian teaching staff

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Integrating environmental sustainability in higher education: comparative perspectives

Proposal

Recent studies have reported that part of the difficulty of infusing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education is not only the confusion over its meaning among educators (Biasutti, Makrakis, & Frate, 2018; Evans, Ferreira, Davis & Stevenson, 2016), but also the challenges educators face due to the political nature of ESD (Håkansson, Kronlid, & Östman, 2017). The aim of this presentation is to discuss the results of recent qualitative research about the perceptions of ESD in Egypt and to shed light on the challenges that Egyptian teaching staff face when adopting ESD approaches in higher education. The research questions are: (1) What are the perceptions of faculty members in regards to SD? (2) How do faculty members perceive their expected roles as educators towards ESD? (3) How their perceptions of ESD influence their current teaching practices and the way they address the English language courses?
Using a qualitative research design, the participants are 18 faculty members in an English department within the faculty of Arts and Humanities at a private university in Egypt. A preliminary survey was conducted at the beginning of the semester to explore faculty members perceptions, then, based on information collected from the survey, a workshop was delivered to expand discussion about SD and ESD concepts. Finally, a follow-up interview was conducted with participants who attended the workshop to explore whether or not their acquired knowledge about SD and ESD influenced their teaching methods.
The presentation will first explore various theories and concepts connected to a sociocultural theoretical framework of ESD. Then, I will discuss the perceptions of university faculty members regarding concepts of SD and ESD. This section focuses on how different perceptions influenced their teaching practices when addressing sustainability issues with students. Results indicate that the workshop helped participants to have a clearer understanding of the concepts of SD and ESD. However, this workshop had limited impact on teaching practices. Results also highlighted the challenges encountered when adopting ESD approaches in higher education. Two such challenges are linked to the political dimension behind ESD, which increases the difficulty of ESD implementation in higher education, especially in post conflict societies such as Egypt where politically sensitive issues are intentionally avoided. Last, the challenges reported by participants in this study are related to comparative and international literature on other relevant cases, especially the use of conflict as an approach in teaching and learning activities (Håkansson, Kronlid, & Östman, 2017). This will help reach better understanding of the political dimensions in ESD. Overall this research has implications for future curriculum, instruction and policies of ESD in higher education within postconflict society necessary to seek ways to overcome such challenges.

Author

• Hanan Salah Yusuf Abozaied, American University in Cairo