Education for sustainability as the future of geography education

Abstract

By focusing on sustainability, geography education has an important opportunity to cement its relevance for secondary and tertiary education. With this emphasis, geography's great strength and interest is that it can examine and integrate issues of sustainability at all spatial scales as they are significant to our lives in an era of globalisation, social change and ecological risk. When issues of sustainability become the foundation value underpinning all teaching and learning in the discipline, students from lower secondary to tertiary level are able to embrace the opportunity to develop their knowledge through inquiry approaches to learning. Examples are provided from middle school and tertiary undergraduate lessons of successful projects that worked to engage students and support higher-level thinking on issues of sustainability.