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.
Initial Teacher Training: the French view
ABSTRACT This paper, against the background of trends in the development of initial teacher training in Europe as a whole, identifies and explains some of the recent, radical reforms which were introduced in France by a socialist government. These include the need to raise the status and the competence of the teaching profession; the creation of new teacher‐training institutions of university status (Instituts universitaires de formation des maitres); the introduction of common entry qualifications at degree level for both primary and secondary levels; the harmonisation and the extension to 2 years of the post‐degree teacher‐training course and the increase in emphasis placed on professional training, both theoretical and practical. These reforms provoked a storm of protest and an examination of the reasons for this reveals a multiplicity of crucial questions which have far‐reaching implications.