The use of criteria when planing, evaluating or completing a project: The case of the ENSI Quality Criteria and the Curriculum Key in Iceland

Abstract

INTRODUCTION This is the story about a research and development project in Iceland between 2007 and 2011 named “GETA”. In Icelandic the name means “capability” and reflects the interest of the project in both Action Competence and Action Research. The underlying focus of the project was to understand what types of educational practice lead to Sustainable Development (Action ESD, 2007). The project model involved school-university co-operation, a year of preparation for the researchers, a year-long in-service course for teachers, assessment of ESD policy and practice in Iceland, small group work and for some, voluntary work with schools as GETA advisors. Three years of low-level funding were provided by Reykjavik Energy and four preschools and four compulsory schools in different municipalities elected to join the GETA project. About 25 teachers and most principals took part in managing school projects of their own choice and around 12–14 researchers took part, several going on to study further. An active web-site was maintained on all project activities (http://skrif.hi.is/geta). The site was still accessible in March 2018. In this paper we describe and comment on the origin and use of two rather different tools used to strengthen ESD activities in the GETA project. One of these tools was the set of guidelines developed and distributed by ENSI and SEED entitled ‘Quality criteria for Education for Sustainable Development’ (Breiting, Mayer, & Mogensen, 2005). The other was the Curriculum Key developed by a sub-group of GETA researchers in order to analyse the national curriculum in Iceland at that time (2008). This analysis turned out to be helpful for teachers in developing their own ESD curriculum within their schools.