Rethinking Teacher Development: Exploring the Intersections of Environmental and Gender-Transformative Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Supporting Teachers to Curb the Polycrises through Education: Reimagining Teacher Professional Development for Peace and Socio-Ecological Justice

Proposal

This paper examines VVOB’s experiences with Teach2Empower, a Belgium-funded initiative providing complementary support to the EU Global Gateway Regional Teachers Initiative for Africa. The programme engages teachers, teacher educators, and education officials to embed both gender-transformative pedagogy (GTP) and green education into teaching and learning practices. GTP seeks to challenge gender stereotypes and promote equitable participation and success among all learners, while green education equips learners to critically engage with and respond collectively to environmental challenges. Although both approaches address interconnected social issues, their intersections have received limited scholarly and practical attention.
Drawing on its work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and Latin-America, VVOB investigates the potential synergies between GTP and green education, exploring whether their integration can strengthen teacher professional development (TPD) and classroom practice. A global conceptual framework has been developed to map the competencies required across multiple levels: learner outcomes (differentiated across education subsectors), learner–teacher interactions, teacher competencies, and aligned TPD strategies.
The intersection of green and gender-transformative pedagogies highlights two central concepts—solidarity and alliance—as foundational for education to contribute to green and gender action. Solidarity emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals with each other and with the environment, while alliance underscores the necessity of collective action to address systemic challenges. For teachers, operationalizing these pedagogies requires the development of specific professional competencies. These include for example the ability to design and facilitate problem-posing, action-oriented learning activities, as well as creating spaces for themselves and their learners to critically reflect and “unlearn” entrenched assumptions. A set of five teacher competencies is put forward to provide a basis for cultivating classrooms that foster both gender equity and climate action through collaborative, transformative practices.
As a next step, the global framework will now be piloted and tested in Kenyan schools with a selected group of teachers, starting with the contextualisation of the framework and the development of accompanying TPD materials.
Emerging insights from the development of the global framework and the initial implementation of the Green–GTP pilot in Kenya are presented in this paper. It reflects on the opportunities, challenges, and conditions necessary to support educators in adopting integrated gender-responsive and environmentally sustainable pedagogical approaches. Participants will also be invited to share feedback, to enrich and further develop the global framework.

Authors

• Inge Vandevyvere, VVOB - education for development

• Hans De Greve, VVOB