Promoting sustainable development through whole school approaches: an

international, intercultural teacher education research and development project

Abstract

This paper focuses on a British Council funded Higher Education (HE) Link project
involving three institutions - Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) in the UK and the
University of South Africa (UNISA) and Rhodes University in the Republic of South Africa.
This is a research and development project that has three main research strands: contextual
profiling that will establish the applicability of a developed European teacher education
project to the southern and South African context; evaluative materials development and
piloting predicated on a respect for indigenous and contextual knowledge; and impact
analysis that will examine the role of multidirectional intergenerational mentoring in
disseminating messages about sustainable lifestyles. The project is strongly influenced by
the South African Revised National Curriculum Statements pertaining to environment; and
an analysis of the impact that these materials have had on promoting whole school
approaches to environmental education. The link’s initial curricular purpose is to develop
advanced certificate in education course materials that will promote whole school
approaches to environmental education, based on developing concepts of collaboration,
pupil participation, educational process and action, in schools in South and southern Africa.
Materials from the MMU based, European Commission funded Sustainability Education in
European Primary Schools (SEEPS) Project, will be adapted for use in South Africa by
UNISA and Rhodes. This paper reports on the development of the project and explores some
of its activities and results to date. The paper documents how the project team approached
the integrating redevelopment of SEEPS ideas and materials to use these resources in the
design of CPD activities for two advanced certificate courses in environmental education in
South Africa. Section two is written in semi-dialogue form to try to reflect the nature of the
discussions that occurred between the four partners in the project during a meeting in the
UK in 2003. This dialogue outlines the conceptual and philosophical background to the
SEEPS Project before examining continuities and tensions that arose in clarifying and
situating guiding perspectives for professional development and whole school approaches in
and for South African school contexts through the medium of teacher education. The paper
also reviews how the South African team are interacting with ideas and materials from
SEEPS, to clarify whole school approaches to environmental education and education for
sustainable development in South and southern Africa. The paper also discusses the contexts
within which the project will unfold.

1: Introduction

At face value, this paper is about a British Council Higher Education Link Project funded
by the UK Department for International Development to promote international
collaboration between MMU and two South African higher education institutions, the
UNISA and Rhodes University. UNISA and Rhodes will develop curriculum materials for
advanced certificate in education courses in environmental education in South Africa. All
projects funded under this British Council programme have to demonstrate a capacity for
promoting sustainable development. This project, Promoting Sustainable Development
through Whole School Approaches, aims to promote sustainable development by
developing whole school approaches to environmental education in schools in South
Africa, through accredited teacher education programmes.

However, on closer examination, the story and future of this project has a potentially
thicker and richer description as it has the capacity to promote intercontinental links in

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teacher education between the European Union and countries in the South African
Development Community (SADC) through the sensitive pooling and translation of ideas
from a European Commission funded teacher education project Sustainability Education in
European Primary Schools (SEEPS). The potential for disseminating the outcomes of this
British Council project to the countries in the SADC Environmental Education Network is
a realistic emergent property of this teacher education focused link.

This project aims to develop teacher education programmes that will promote sustainable
development through effective universal primary education, literacy and access to
information and life skills. The materials produced by the link are intended to implement
the South African Revised National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship
between human rights, a healthy environment, social justice and inclusivity in the context
of whole school development and continuing professional development (CPD) for
educators. Through the promotion of high levels of pupil participation, learning by doing
and action project work (SANTAG, 2000a), it will encourage good local community and
school governance, the realisation of children’s rights and their empowerment key policy
objectives of the South African Schools Act (1996) through its establishment of elected
school governing bodies (Grant Lewis and Naidoo, 2004). A feature of whole school
approaches to environmental education is that schools and their pupils play a role in
promoting locally determined solutions to authentic sustainability concerns that affect their
own communities. This project envisages that whole school development in South Africa
will be initiated or promoted by teachers educated through advanced certificate courses
developed by UNISA and Rhodes. Local solutions might include activities such as the
sustainable management of physical and natural resources through the development of
school grounds, health education or other sustainable development objectives identified in
the United Nations’ Millennium Goals.

The project is based on a mixed mode, synergistic distance learning strategy that will
harness information and communications technologies (ICT) to share skills and knowledge
among teachers and teacher educators. Through intergenerational mentoring, there is the
potential to educate teachers, other adults and young people in sustainable development
strategies that can contribute to the alleviation of poverty and the reduction in the impact
of poverty-related issues in local South and southern African contexts. This prioritising of
the education of teachers to reorient their teaching towards sustainable development gels
with the preferred strategy of the UNECSCO Teacher advisory Group on Education for
Sustainable Development.

SEEPS was developed by educationalists from thirteen European countries, including

higher education teacher educators, inspectors and advisors from ministries and boards of
education, education officers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and teachers.
This range of experience provided diverse professional, cultural and geographical
contextual perspectives on education for sustainable development and CPD. SEEPS is a
school development project designed to assist teachers to develop whole school
approaches (Figure 1) in education for sustainable development. It promotes school
focused CPD that provides materials to support teachers in developing CPD programmes
in their own schools, after a member of staff has been trained in the use of the materials.
The Project is founded on a number of assumptions about education for sustainable
development, whole school approaches, ideologies of pupils and teachers and CPD

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Whole school approaches came to be seen by the whole links team as collaborative,
school-based, active learning processes where goal-directed activities arise as local
initiatives that engage questions of environment and sustainability. Although all the
partners recognise the problematics associated with definitions of environmental
education, sustainability and the nature and philosophy of teacher education they have
consciously set out to explore shared meanings rather than ambiguities or tensions. These
shared meaning are not intended to create the illusion of generic, universal descriptions of
complex socially and culturally constructed terms but to identify common cross-cultural
denotations. The project team also shared the view that environmental awareness, the
assumption that if people are aware of the environmental crisis they will act for its
resolution, has not been successful as an educational strategy for promoting societal scale
sustainable actions (Sterling, 2001). Unfortunately environmental awareness is a strategy
that is still all too prevalent in teacher education in environmental education. The project
team believe that the heart of the environmental education crisis lies in the neglect of the
action competence (Schnack, 1995) that facilitates sustainable lifestyles. This action
competence is best developed through the action-focused synergistic pedagogy that whole
school approaches encapsulate. The question that needed to be answered was what was
the best approach to professional development in South Africa that would promote the
widest dissemination, adoption and implementation of the whole school philosophy
advocated by and in the SEEPS materials.

2: Whole school approaches: it’s the journey that matters!

The text in sections two and three has been organised around discussions of the central
themes that informed and shaped the British Council Project. It has been written from the
participant observer perspective of complete participants (Gold, 1958). It was important
to discuss ideas about whole school approaches, environmental education and
sustainability and approaches to CPD in order to decide how and why the Project should
proceed. In this section the European rooted philosophy of the SEEPS Project is
presented first. What follows is the response of the South African partners. These
discussions inevitably reflected the different cultural and professional contexts in which the
partners operate.

SEEPS: The school cannot teach democracy unless it practices democracy at all
levels (Council of Europe, 1999: 9).

Whole school approaches are a major platform of the SEEPS Project. These approaches
aim to integrate five strands of educational practice (Figure 1) in a school culture that
seeks to practise what it teaches by minimising the discontinuities between espoused
values and values in action (Posch, 1993). The contextual profiling undertaken at the
beginning of SEEPS showed a commitment to such approaches by many schools and by
the project developers. Realising SE through whole school approaches involves changing
many educational practices. This is transformatory rather than reformatory or
accommodatory change, because it involves altering the culture and deep structures of
schools rather than implementing change that absorbs the language of reform (Popkewitz
et al., 2001:26) somewhat blindly distinguishing between text and practice so that
transformation tends to become a rhetoric accommodated within the status quo.

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Whole school approaches have the potential to promote the transformation to sustainable
lifestyles because they encapsulate positive reasons for the advocacy of collaboration,
democracy and participation by prioritising the socialisation and transformative purposes
of education. The continuity of social relationships in whole school approaches is
indispensable in reducing defection and increasing the mutual trust that leads to
cooperation (Ridley, 1996). These largely bottom-up approaches reflect democratic values
unlike top-down behaviourist approaches.

The SEEPS Project expresses the belief that the processes through which schools promote
collective actions is more critical than the substance of these actions. An environmental
education ethos should promote a collaborative culture of communication and decision-
making based on mutual recognition and respect. Key features of collaborative cultures
(Nias et al., 1989), or active school cultures (Smyth and Hattam, 2002), are their beliefs,
values, understandings, attitudes, meanings, norms, symbols, rituals and ceremonies.
Collaborative cultures fuse the social, political and intellectual by respecting and fostering
diversity while building trust They are built on the beliefs that individuals and groups
should be valued because individuals are inseparable from groups. They suggest that the
best way of promoting values is through openness and a sense of mutual security.
Democratic schools support teacher collaboration and shared decision-making and have
structures that cater for caring and serious learning (Uzzell et al., 1994), they are critical
and inclusive in their organisational culture (Giroux, 1996).

A democratic curriculum, in Dewey’s sense, must be open to the continuous

evolution of knowledge and values; it must alert pupils to that continuous
evolution; and it must invite challenge to whatever seems to be the prevailing
orthodoxy in any sphere (Blenkin et al., 1992: 22).

Democracy is about the common good, not just self-interest, so democratic schools are
more concerned with advancing collaboration and cooperation than privileging
competition (Beane and Apple, 1999, Sterling, 2001). ‘Democratic educators seek not
simply to lessen the harshness of social inequities in school but to change the conditions
that create them’ (Beane and Apple, 1999: 13). The action focus in whole school
approaches means that teacher education institutions need to evaluate and promote
synergy between the five strands of whole school/institution approaches, they need to
practise what they teach or literally to walk the talk.

While definitions of environmental education and sustainability will always be problematic,

they consistently contain commitments to engaging in and changing actions, values,
attitudes and knowledge (Orr, 1992, Oelschlaeger, 1995, Shallcross and Wilkinson, 1998,
Uzzell, 1999). These intermeshed cognitive, affective and active strands are evident in the
most recent UNESCO (1997) description of education for sustainable development. The
SEEPS Project sees action as a continuous flow of contextually determined conduct
(Argyris and Schon, 1996) that should not to be confused with behavioural change that
follows an externally prescribed direction (Uzzell et al., 1994). Contextually determined
actions are more than behaviour because they are both locally situated and intentional
(Schnack, 1998), reflecting the existential integration of the cognitive and affective in
action (Bandura, 1986). Actions can be individual, collective direct or indirect. Direct

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actions are those of people on the environment such as the holding actions of eco-
warriors, indirect actions are those of people attempting to influence others, (Jensen,
2002). Zimmerman (1994) classifies direct actions as political and personal

Environmental education should be concerned with authentic actions (Uzzell et al., 1994);
local actions that are most effective when they respond to larger socio-economic and
ecological contexts. An action focus is critical in environmental education because it
reduces the sense of powerlessness through a culturally critical approach to civic
education. It facilitates educational processes in which learning and action proceed hand in
hand reducing defection by strengthening attachment and intergenerational
communication.

However if whole school collaborative cultures are to be developed, teachers need to be

proficient in interpersonal skills and knowledgeable about group processes such as
communication and conflict resolution (Pollard, 1985). This whole school agenda places
great responsibility on teachers as moral agents and therefore on teacher education
programmes. It locates the learning to be a teacher within a situative community of
practice model (Greeno et al., 1996) that places a professional obligation on teacher
education institutions to discuss, deliberate and apply actions that address sustainability
not only in the formal teacher education curriculum but also in the social and institutional
practices of the organisation. This is learning as doing that acknowledges the power of the
nonformal curriculum to educate affect and action. However much of the literature on
communities of practice has emerged from traditional agrarian societies. The community
of practice concept of new learners as peripheral practitioners resonates with the induction
of trainee teachers. However the concept of learning and applying prescribed practices
does not locate easily with the problematic lack of knowledge about what sustainable
societies look like and the contextual sensitivity of both education and the actions
appropriate to the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. The term community of action that
acknowledge the need to deliberate, select and apply may be a better term to describe the
learning philosophy among a community of professional practitioners committed to
sustainable whole school development.

South Africa: There is a philosophical continuity in the shared belief among the partners
in the efficacy of whole school approaches. For South African contexts whole school
approaches should be approached as collaborative, school-based, learning actions where
goal-directed activities arise amidst local initiatives and through an engagement with wide-
ranging questions of environment and sustainability; a similar perspective to that adopted
in the SEEPS Project. The balance between outside support and locally directed action
will be important to the success of the South African project. A rationale that privileges
locally directed action resonates with the needs and challenges of southern African school
contexts. This embedded perspective could support the Project team to approach the
adaptive use of SEEPS materials with the necessary attention to local advocacy.

However, there are practical tensions. By the mid-1990s school-based approaches to

environmental education in South Africa were largely extra-curricular being centred on
enviro-clubs, schools undertaking local conservation and environment projects and/or
teams of teachers, parents and pupils developing school environmental policies. These
activities were usually undertaken with the support of environmental agencies working

5
alongside schools to implement their notions of sustainable practice rather than those of
education authorities. A developing suite of competitions and policy development activities
were undertaken at schools as add-on extras (le Roux, 2003) through which rewards came
to pupils and schools in the form of external awards and recognition, rather than as part of
a whole school approach,

The new outcomes based education system privileges local learning outcomes rather than
whole school approaches and the challenge of locally determined outcomes is hard to
realise given a residual ‘know-all’ teaching culture that is a relic of the external authority
of earlier colonial and/or apartheid perspectives. Recently school-based activities by
government, environment and health agencies have responded to the provision of water,
sanitation and electricity with education programmes that aim to foster the wise
(sustainable) use of these resources (SANTAG, 2001). These interventions are
characterised by a beseeching but still external authority that has the appearances of being
participative. Many of these forms of directive environmental education have been
accompanied by a persisting culture of resistance directed against imposition that does not
allow the time and space for locally directed choices, decisions and actions as advocated in
the SEEPS Project. Thus challenges of meaningful local engagement that still remain may
be ameliorated by the adaptation of whole school philosophies in South Africa. Advanced
certificate in education courses represent one significant way of promulgating such whole
school philosophies.

Figure 1: The Five Strands of a Whole School Approach to Environmental Education

1. 4.
Formal Self-
Curriculum evaluation
and Pedagogy.

5.
Community Links.

2. 3.
Institutional Culture Institutional
and Ethos: Social and Practice: Technical
Organisational and Economic
Aspects. Aspects.

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For the vast majority of African societies, education was not fragmentary but integral to
everyday life actions before the colonialists and western educationists came
(Mwanakatwe, 1968; Irwin, 1993; WWF ZEP, 1999). These traditional education and
conservation systems were largely dismantled by colonisation. Scientific and conservation
organisations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural
Resources (IUCN) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), were concerned with the
conservation of wildlife resources (Booth et al., 1997). With these developments,
‘environment’ was mostly seen in terms of nature (Thompson, 1998) and early
environmental education had a strong conservation and nature experience orientation.

From these early roots, environmental education was active in responding to the liberation
struggle and emerging socio-economic and sustainability agendas into the 1990s. One of
the offshoots of the political changes of the mid-1990s, has been the unmuzzling and
amplification of historically silenced voices, in the struggle for customary rights of access,
inclusive approaches and institutional change (Zerner, 2000) but this raising of voice has
not often come through formal education provision. The transformation to more liberal
multi-party politics has reconfigured political landscapes in southern African. With the shift
to democratic political governance, a wider view of environmental education, with a focus
on critique and social change has emerged, similar to the SEEPS conception of
sustainability education. These perspectives have influenced all spheres of life in the
region, including education. For example, curriculum reforms are now influenced by
liberal democracy theories since these resonate with social and political transformation.
Today environmental concerns are reflected in the National Curriculum as socio-ecological
issues that are integral to each learning area (subject). The new curriculum has a strong
citizenship, economic development and sustainable lifestyles focus. This perspective
departs from the prevailing didactic culture of schooling in South Africa that challenged
transformation. Environmental education in South Africa is also seen as an education that
integrates social, economic and scientific knowledge to distance it in some ways from
common understandings of environmental education in Europe as a green education that is
only associated with the natural world.

The situative learning embedded in communities of practice has particular resonance in the
context of intergenerational mentoring in many traditional, rural South African locations.
Communities of practice are important media for the transfer of indigenous knowledge,
which still has a powerful role in establishing a knowledge base in sustainable
development. If this traditionally situated learning can be combined with communities of
action in schools that are developing the action competence to address the complexities of
sustainable development through ‘solutions’ sensitive to local cultures and environment
the prospect for multidirectional intergenerational mentoring is real. There is plenty of
evidence of adults mentoring young people in South Africa and interestingly emerging
evidence of young people educating their peers and elders in sustainable development. The
cholera outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal in 2000 is an example of how young people of school
age helped to improve the situation through sanitation education that set out to
disseminate good health practices to adults and other young people through formal
education (SANTAG, 2000a and 2001). Clearly teacher education needs not only to
expose its students to this multidirectional intergenerational mentoring as an emergent,
catalytic property of an integrated approach to whole school development, but to equip
them with the professional skills to become agents of change capable of promoting and

7
developing such approaches, hence the need for the advanced certificate courses in South
Africa and SEEPS in Europe.

3: Continuing professional development

SEEPS: Meaning cannot be masterminded at a global level. It is found through

small-scale pursuits of significant personal and organisational goals. The
school is the “center” of change (Fullan, 1991, p. 348).

Effective CPD integrates three domains of knowledge; theoretical, contextual and personal
(see Figure 2). In the SEEPS Project teachers are asked to engage with theories, models
and/or principles in the context of European case studies, through the filter of their own
experience. While the occupational culture of primary teachers prefers the pragmatically
and practically active to the theoretical (Lortie, 1975, King, 1983, Alexander, 1984), the
theoretical is crucial if the whole school concept is to be transferred and developed
successfully. Theories, models and principles are not presented in the SEEPS materials as
ideological dogma, but in a liberal humanist philosophy of personal choice that seeks to
foster deliberation by providing busy teachers with synopses of theoretical perspectives
proffered in a suggestive rather than prescriptive vein.

Figure 2: The Three Knowledge Domains of Effective CPD

Codified knowledge, theory,

principles.

CPD
Contextual Personal
Knowledge, case studies knowledge,
reflective and
reflexive

While one approach to teacher education is to start where teachers are, hence the need for
contextual analysis early in the life of a project, teacher educators should also show
leadership in their dissemination of intellectual capital. Thus advocacy becomes an
important function of the teacher educator. What is critical about advocacy is the level at
which it occurs. The SEEPS Project advocates a platform, (Figure 3), based on whole
school approaches that focus on educational processes (level 2). The advocacy of ultimate
values (level 1) or preferred ideological stances often results in contestation, debate and
argument with those who subscribe to different ideologies or ultimate values, often leading
to self-defeating, academic, internecine, uncivil warfare (Zimmerman, 1994, Paden, 1994).

8
Furthermore there is equifinality at the platform level in realising whole school approaches
as teachers and schools’ subscription to such philosophies is frequently based on a
diversity of ultimate, environmental, religious, philosophical and cultural values or
ideologies. Specific decisions and actions (Levels 3 and 4 in Figure 3) are not prescribed in
the SEEPS Project, but they are used as exemplars, as the whole school philosophy
adopted sees lifestyle and policy decisions and concrete actions as a matter for local
deliberation.

Figure 3: The Four Levels of Deep Ecology (modified from Naess, 1995)
Theory of Level 4. Ethical
Action. Theory.
Level 3.
Level 2.
Level 1.

Ultimate Values.

Platforms.

Lifestyle and Policy

Decisions.
Des Jardins-philosophical ethics, level 1, normative ethics: level 2, descriptive
ethics: levels 3 & 4.
Naess 4 levels-values, principles, policies, actions. Level 2 formulations are
descriptive not prescriptive thus how representative any set of views is at level 2 is

Three modes of CPD could appear relevant to the promotion of whole school approaches;
1. Centralised; where teachers attend a course run by a teacher education
organisation
2. School based; often taught by untrained school staff in their schools, sometimes
supported by an external training pack.

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 3. School focused; adopts a ‘training the trainers’ approach where materials are
provided to support teachers running professional development sessions in their
own schools.

The SEEPS Project attempted to avoid the pitfalls of centralised CPD that sees change as
externally driven, does not consider how institutional factors influence change and does
not equip teachers with the skills to manage change within their own school (Fullan,
1991). In some narrower areas, where the focus of CPD is on the classroom teacher, this
approach can be successful. But in environmental education, where the whole school is the
target for change, centralised CPD has severe deficiencies (Fullan, 1991). School based
CPD also has its problems. It is often founded on the pooling of ignorance (Blenkin et al.,
1992) and open to parochialism when schools and/or trainers find difficulty in learning
from the experiences of others. Often the range of school-based CPD activities is limited
by the resources and expertise of a school’s staff and CPD needs are frequently only seen
as those which are internal to the school, resulting in a myopic focus that overlooks
external circumstances (Hewton, 1988). School based approaches operate on the implicit
assumption that good teachers are automatically good trainers, an assumption which
Evans (1993) challenges:

As many of the agents in SBI 1 are teachers or former teachers, this is not
always the case; they have to beware of not becoming the ‘know all’ but the
guide who is going to help the participants onto the right track. It is stated
that in many situations the agent’s lack of expertise in team leadership and in
presentation and communication skills has an adverse effect on the training
programme (22).

School focused CPD means that the school is the locus of change. But unlike school based
CPD, which may be supported by an untrained member of staff or externally produced
distance learning packages, school focused CPD trains trainers and provides adaptable
training materials which can support activities undertaken by the school and its staff. CPD
for whole school environmental education has to be school focused, but this process has
to connect with the wider environment (Smyth, 1994). Therefore CPD designed to
promote environmental education needs to be context based and relevant, with staff
development that focuses on the school level. Change, if it is to be successful in
stimulating and maintaining environmental education, requires collaboration with other
schools, external advisors and resource bases. In short, support networks are required
which will assist schools in navigating their way through change. If schools are granted
greater autonomy significant reforms could take place within schools, classrooms or
communities, rather than being directed from national, provincial or district levels
(UNESCO, 1997), but schools need the skills and resources to mange this autonomy.

A school-focused approach combines features of both centralised and school–based CPD

and there are pragmatic reasons for adopting such an approach especially in the SEEPS
Project that was developed for use in a wide range of European educational systems with
a variety of approaches to professional development. Contextual analysis at the start of the
SEEPS Project showed the dominance of school based CPD, especially in the UK, which

1
SBI School based in-service education.

10
was surprising in the extent to which it relied on internal trainers i.e. teachers. If the
SEEPS Project had arrived in schools as a set of materials it would have fallen victim to
many of the failings associated with school based initiatives. The SEEPS support materials
are only released to schools after a trainer has attended a minimum two-day (or
equivalent) training course. By making the SEEPS Project available to schools on CDRom
its materials become organic as they be downloaded and adapted and/or translated to suit
the context and needs specific to an individual school or school cluster. If school-focused
development becomes associated with democratic, progressive education this may assist
pupil participation. Standards not standardisation (Shulman, 1987) are the keys to
progressing education in ways that make children visible. Such standards cannot be
imposed from without; they must arise within an atmosphere of mutual internal respect
(Gardner, 1993).

South Africa: While there are philosophical continuities among the partners about the
model of CPD used in the SEEPS Project (Figure 2), professional development was the
area in which the greatest divergences and tensions arose. In the process of securing
educators’ newly ascribed and affirmed status as mediators of learning in South Africa, an
aspiration shared with the SEEPS Project, appropriate strategies for empowering
practising and prospective teachers to fulfil this role meaningfully, need to be explored and
set in place. Within the South African context, these strategies and processes will be
provided through centralised advanced certificate in education courses rather than school-
focused approaches. The course materials produced by the South African partners will be
designed specifically to meet this need. It is anticipated that, in addition, the principles
upon which the courses will be built will foster and provide for the advocacy of whole
school development and sustainability, but this will be an approach to whole school
development that will be routed through initiatives in the formal curriculum (see Figure 1.
Box 1) rather than giving schools and teachers the freedom to decide other entry points as
the school-focused model does. The emphasis on a centralised curricular focus in the
advanced certificate environmental education courses in South Africa was not the result of
a difference in vision but a reflection of the sensitivity to the need for a different design, a
different theory of action, for the different educational context of South Africa. All the
project partners acknowledged the synergy between whole school approaches and a
school-focused model of CPD. However there are practical realities in South Africa that
make a certificated, centralised approach to CPD a pragmatic necessity. A CPD model that
could link with new formal curriculum developments in environmental education in South
Africa was going to offer a more promising design in terms of central government and
teacher support.

With the introduction of environment as a phase organiser in the South African National
Curriculum in 1996, it became necessary to enable practising teachers to teach to this
curriculum requirement. Tertiary institutions introduced the Further Diploma in
Education– a qualification offered at postgraduate level - (which later became known as
the Advanced Certificate in Education) to meet this need. The purpose of the ACE was
threefold: to provide training in a new specialist area, to enable career change and to
provide the opportunity to upgrade qualifications. UNISA was one of the first higher
education institutions in South Africa to introduce an advanced certificate in
environmental education. This British Council project provides the ideal opportunity to

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explore ways of incorporating and adapting the SEEPS material to South African
circumstances and to strengthen the qualification in relation to whole school development.

In a similar way to UNISA, Rhodes University developed an advanced certificate in

environmental education in response to the CPD needs of teachers and conservation
agency staff who had a diploma but wanted a higher qualification in environmental
education. This advanced certificate was first run as a small-scale programme with a group
of ten teachers and conservation agency staff. A key focus in the two-year, part-contact
course was the adaptive use of learning support materials in educational activities. To this
end an activity on environmental education policy and policy development was written and
taught at the end of the first year. This module was well received but it was found that the
paper policy became somewhat of an end in itself. Thus there was a need to give closer
attention to policy as one tool in the quest for action-focused sustainable schools and
institutions. The advanced certificate materials are being updated partly by giving greater
attention to steering ideas that might support whole school development better, such as
the SEEPS Project.

In order to underpin the transition from the “know all” to the “know how” teacher, from
the teacher who assembles facts to the teacher who develops intellectual capital, it is
necessary to negotiate frameworks for course materials that enable “knowing how". This
requires certain presuppositions and prerequisites. Firstly, that CPD courses be written in
such a way that educators are supported to work with materials rather than to work to
materials – from working from the cognitive to engaging with the contextual and
experiential. Secondly, that in support of the preceding methodology, space be provided to
achieve the outcomes of environmental literacy within and through working from various
paradigms – that environmental literacy and learning from sustainability be perceived as a
developmental process - a continuum of environmentally related skills, knowledge and
attitudes - and that this is not a simple linear progression. This provision of the space to
consider competing paradigms and/or ideologies is an important continuity with the
SEEPS Project materials. Thirdly, that in keeping with the foregoing, different modes of
supporting conceptual engagement with course materials be explored and that courses and
their associated materials be designed in such a manner that they meet the essentially
curricular and pedagogical needs and expectations of educators who study in a distance,
contact or semi-contact mode. This implies that a number of relatively new dimensions to
course delivery modes in the South African higher education field, including e-learning, be
explored in pursuit of a more synergistic approach to professional learning.

A pivotal issue in the process of course deliberation and materials development is to

ensure that there is consistency between theory and practice and that policy and advocacy
be embodied by engaging in meaning making in and for better practice. This is a tension
not only for South Africa, but one that SEEPS actively seeks to resolve. Thus CPD
materials that promote environmental education should advocate the search for
consistency between policy and the implementation of that policy; between espoused
values and values in action (Posch, 1993), between espoused theories and theories in use
(Argyris and Schon, 1996). Unless this theory-practice gap is bridged, there is a potential
for creating what could be termed a social hypocrisy - that what individuals and schools
advocate in the formal curriculum is not reflected in what they do in their organisational
culture or institutional practice. Given the nature and urgency of the sustainability crisis

12
(Wilson, 2002) this British Council link would stand accused of a sin of omission at might
help to foster attitudes that encourage environmental apathy if it did not prioritise action-
focused education that sought congruence with institutional policy.

A major tension was that a school focused CPD model, that advocates multiple entry
points to whole school approaches to environmental education in which each school
decides its own entry point (see Figure 1), could not be adopted in South Africa, at least
initially. A curriculum generated, qualifications focus for CPD in environmental education
in South Africa is essential, as a consequence of the introduction of Curriculum 2005.
CPD in South Africa has to have a curriculum driver to gain attention from policy makers,
administrators and teachers and the need to improve the qualifications of large numbers of
teachers is also a paramount national concern. In Curriculum 2005 environment was
initially introduced as a cross cutting ‘phase organiser’ and subsequently after a review of
the initial Curriculum 2005, as a national concern, integral to each learning area in this
curriculum document.

Another important tension that arose during the project team’s discussions, partly to do
with with the differing modes through which courses would be taught by the two
universities, was the realisation of the different contexts within which advanced certificate
courses in environmental education will be piloted in South Africa (Limpopo, Kwazulu-
Natal and Eastern Province). All these are areas very different to Europe (to such an
extent that they are not really comparable). Each of these case study areas will have to be
individually assessed through contextual profiling and analysis to inform the project
sufficiently about the possibility of achieving improved environmental learning through
whole school approaches. Assessment should also be informative about the impact that
teachers who have studied the advanced certificate may have on environmental learning in
schools and possibly communities in these different contexts. The different South African
contexts will also be influenced and directed by other projects (such as the EcoSchool’s
project of the Wildlife and Environment Society of Southern Africa in partnership with the
Department of Education and of UNISA’s Science Outreach project, sponsored by
external bank funding.

4: Conclusion

Schools are on the one hand densely populated, actively constructed, finely balanced and
continuously changing. On the other, they are stable, subject to the head’s authority and
the influence of a peer groups controlled by allegiance to shared beliefs and values (Nias
et al., 1989). Whole school approaches based on collaborative, active cultures (Smyth and
Hattam, 2002) have the potential to synthesise these apparent contradictions but this
requires the development of appropriate CPD courses to foster these changes.

Given the advent of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-
2015), the provision of CPD in environmental education is a critical issue and one that
receives little attention in the literature. There are 80 million teachers in the world and if
UNESCO (1997) is to achieve its aim of making education one of the top four UN
priorities in achieving sustainable development, considered thought has to be given to
appropriate models of CPD for different contexts. Professional development strategies are
a particular priority in both pre-service and in-service teacher environmental education

13
given the forthcoming decade of education for sustainable development. Whatever the
educational system, be it European or South African professional development must have
a significant whole school development philosophy.

It has become evident that despite some differences in approaches to the project that have
caused tensions, there are many aspects that may be defined as continuities that strengthen
the project. One of these strengths is that an advanced certificate course will be developed
in a distance education mode by the University of South Africa and in part contact mode
by Rhodes University. The SEEPS material developed for the European context will be
utilised and developed for both these modes of teaching through a participatory and
democratic approach to course development.

However the British Council project still contains many unanswered questions, which have
led to some tensions in the compatibility of the European and South African case studies
and within case studies in South Africa. A carefully designed research process should shed
light upon these tensions and lead to their relief. Research may also inform the project as
to whether the intended mode of teaching (on-line) is successful or not for teaching an
advanced certificate in South Africa and /or whether a mixed approach will deliver better
results.

We hope that the discursive structure of this paper has illustrated that a common blind
spot of assumptive epistemological neo-colonialism, often found in projects such as this, is
being engaged as a central concern in the developing project and its associated research
activities. We have indicated that the project is founded on a very strong shared platform
of process focused, whole school approaches that means that the spirit of the SEEPS
Project has resonance with similar struggles in southern Africa. The project will thus not
develop as a matter of translation or adaptive transfer but as an engaged pooling of ideas
within which SEEPS is both a useful model and source for course development in South
Africa. The discussion of continuities and tensions we also hope shows that there is no
uncritical globalising dissemination or transfer of Western educational ideas or materials
that are insensitive to different educational cultures in South Africa, for such an approach
would be intellectually and ethically unsustainable.

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Authors
Tony Shallcross (Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University), Cheryl le
Roux and Callie Loubser (University of South Africa) and Rob O’Donoghue and Justin
Lupele (Rhodes University, Grahamstown)

18