ESD Implementation Using a Whole-Community Approach in Okayama, Japan: Potential and Challenges from the Teacher Education Perspective

Abstract

This chapter explores the requirements of a whole-community approach that are important for teachers to implement education for sustainable development (ESD) based on a specific example. ESD seeks fundamental changes in our values and lifestyles at the root of sustainability issues. The transformational learning at the core of ESD will emerge in the process of legitimate peripheral participation in ESD-Communities of Practice (CoP). ESD is also a process in which people participate in various CoPs related to sustainability in a multidimensional manner through appropriate educational practice, so that each community is activated and stimulates each other to create new values. In one school district in Okayama, with gardening in the junior high school’s (JHS’s) courtyard as the starting point, various stakeholders in the local community have come to be engaged. Teachers not only knot-work these people but are also actively involved in their activities and are a model for students as ESD actors. Here, the idea of raising children and creating communities together based on the idea of valuing various lives has firmly taken root, which has greatly contributed to the improvement of the school itself. Analysed here are the details of this process to read suggestions for teacher education for ESD.