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This study revisits the seminal question of the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD) by using a novel longitudinal approach. Scholarly attention in the past decade has been increasingly directed towards the concept of action competence for sustainability. However, little is still known about the effects of ESD as a teaching approach to help develop students' action competence for sustainability. This study therefore adopts a three-wave longitudinal design, tapping into the development of 760 Swedish upper secondary students' self-perceived action competence for sustainability as related to their experience of ESD teaching at their school. We can conclude that ESD has effect on students' action competence for sustainability. Our longitudinal growth models show that it is possible to develop students' action competence, which is affected by their experience of ESD teaching at their school. However, the students did not significantly develop the action competence component confidence under their own influence. Our findings reveal that developing students' action competence by implementing ESD in formal education takes time, and they shed light on the need for longitudinal research studies in the field of ESD.

During the past decade, numerous schools in Sweden have implemented education for sustainable development (ESD) as an explicit guiding approach in teaching. In this paper, we investigate the effect of this approach in comparison with that of pupils taught in ordinary schools. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of sustainability consciousness to represent the holistic view of sustainability. Within the concept of sustainability consciousness, we combine and investigate the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development in terms of sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was developed to evaluate pupils' sustainability consciousness through a nationwide study in Sweden. A total of 1773 pupils from the 6th and 9th grades participated. The results indicated that the ESD profile schools had a small positive effect on the pupils' sustainability consciousness, while in grade 9 the effect was negative. The implications for further ESD implementation are discussed.

Teachers' pro-environmental behaviour, conceptions and attitudes towards nature and the environment were investigated using 47 questions from the BIOHEAD-Citizen questionnaire. The sample included 1,109 pre- and in-service teachers from Sweden and France. Analyses showed only few significant differences between female and male teachers. Forty-one questions were further analysed in terms of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism claims that women and men's conceptions and attitudes towards nature and the environment differ, in the sense that women show higher awareness of environmental issues than men. Our study finds quite poor support for this claim and therefore challenges ecofeminism. This may have implications for environmental education and the perspectives of sustainable development at schools, as our results indicate that there is no reason to fear that male teachers are less engaged with environmental education than female teachers.

This article describes the results of a nationwide questionnaire study of 3229 Swedish upper secondary school teachers' conceptual understanding of sustainable development in relation to their subject discipline and teaching experience. Previous research has shown that teachers have difficulties understanding the complex concept of sustainable development. According to the Swedish curriculum, all teachers in all subjects should integrate a holistic perspective of sustainable development including economic, ecological, and social dimensions. This study shows that teachers differ in their understanding of the concept mostly according to their subject traditions. Social science teachers emphasize social dimensions and science teachers' ecological dimensions, respectively. Teachers are aware of the relevance of the three dimensions to various degrees, but do not generally have a holistic understanding. The greatest uncertainty in teachers' understanding is related to the economic dimension. Science and social science teachers are critical of incorporating economic growth into the concept of sustainable development while language, vocational, and esthetical-practical teachers are not. No experience-bound differences of the teachers' understanding could be found, but recently qualified teachers consider their understanding of sustainable development to be poorer in comparison with more experienced teachers' self-evaluation. The study highlights the need for further training in sustainable development since more than 70% of the questioned teachers stated that they need such training.