Improving Quality Education/Learning Using the ESD Learning Performance Framework

The Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) concept, although strongly linked to quality education is still outside of mainstream education and learning. And with the future of education tilted towards more qualitative, bi-directional student-centered learning than uni-directional teaching, the Decade of ESD which was launched to promote and integrate ESD in all areas of learning and hence quality education has made progress although more improvement is needed. This is particularly in the area of continual implementation and strengthening and evaluation of ESD by offering guidance on identifying the important factors and characteristics that lead to effective ESD learning performance and ultimately quality education.

This paper investigates the qualitative achievements of ESD and presents ESD learning performance as a tool for enhancing particularly ESD-based quality education/ learning. Through an action-reflection process cycle of relaying the ESD elemental characteristics to the local ESD practice cases of ten regional centres of expertise ((RCEs) selected from East and Southeast Asia) and the educational/learning theories and methodologies grounded in the literature, both process and content characteristics that underpin quality education were clearly and comprehensively identified and developed into a learning performance framework (LPF).

The framework therefore has the capability of 1) fostering the evaluation of ESD best practices at the local level through better identification and subsequent translation of the ESD agenda into a new global education/learning framework, and 2) enhancing quality education in the formal education sector, particularly a) developing a holistic and relevant school curricula with transformative educational contents and teaching approaches, b) improving teacher competence in relation to the LPF elemental characteristics, and c) providing a safe learning environments for students. Furthermore, recommendations are made for users identified through their links to aspects of the framework where their areas of operation are strongly associated.