Responding to global challenges through education : Entrepreneurial, sustainable, and pro-environmental education in nordic teacher education curricula

Abstract

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the European Union’s strategies both set goals for solving environmental challenges faced by societies and communities. As part of solving these challenges, both the UN and the EU stress the development of entrepreneurial and innovative education. Teacher education plays a crucial role in these efforts, since teachers and teacher educators have a significant impact on educating citizens far into the future. In this research, we studied how Nordic (Finnish, Swedish, and Icelandic) primary teacher education curricula involve entrepreneurial, sustainable, and pro-environmental education. For this study, the authors analyzed the B.Ed. curricula of three academic teacher education institutions in Spring 2021. We used qualitative content analysis as our research method. According to the results, all three curricula incorporated both entrepreneurship education and sustainable development to some extent, although often not very explicitly. Given the urgency of problems such as global climate change, the educational goals and contents in these curricula related to entrepreneurial education and sustainable development are very limited. The idea of integrating environmental/sustainable and entrepreneurship education could be promoted in the future more explicitly, with these interdisciplinary educational themes emphasised more strongly in the curricula and education policies.