Towards Integrating Education for Sustainable Development at Initial Teacher Training: The Case of Lesotho College of Education
This viewpoint paper presents some findings of a participatory action research programme carried out by teacher trainers at the Lesotho College of Education (LCE) in order to integrate education for sustainable development (ESD) into its courses. It reveals how social learning brings about deep meaning as students connect subject content knowledge through participatory learning to their sociocultural backgrounds. Participants were later interviewed to ascertain their views on teaching for sustainable development and on interdisciplinary collaboration as a means of enhancing quality in teaching and learning. The findings indicate that some participants had, as a result of the action research project, been able to emerge from the culture of academic isolation through initiating collaboration with other teacher trainers outside the study area.
Encountering Paradigmatic Tensions and Shifts in Environmental Education
In response to environmental degradation, the Lesotho government, in 
collaboration with the Danish government, introduced an Environmental 
Education Support Project in schools in 2001. In order to optimise the 
achievement of the project goals the, Monitoring and Research Team was 
established to formatively evaluate the project as it unfolded. The principles of 
action research were to guide the monitoring process. The paper discusses the 
findings of the early phase of the monitoring process with reference to Project’s 
epistemological commitment to initiate paradigmatic shift, in the context of 
conceptualizing environmental education and the associated learning theories 
and teaching approaches through workshops with relevant stakeholders in the 
school curricula development. It is illustrated that the workshops initiated 
cognitive tensions and shifts amongst the participants, and that their occurrence 
was indicative of the interrogation of the positivist paradigm underpinning the 
education system in Lesotho.
The search for quality: A five country study of national strategies to improve educational quality in Central Asia
Abstract This paper presents a comparative analysis of the strategies employed over the last decade by governments of five Central Asia republics—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—to raise educational quality at the primary and secondary levels. Data are drawn from a 2002 cross-national study sponsored by the Asian Development Bank that examined recent education reform efforts across these countries. Using a globalization perspective, a comparison of countries on 14 strategies that were most commonly used by these countries suggested that efforts to raise education quality met with mixed results. While raising the quality of education was a popular cause and a safe political goal, it proved to be an elusive target.