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.
Extent of East-African Nurse Leaders' Participation in Health Policy Development
This paper reports part of a bigger study whose aim was to develop an empowerment model that could be used to enhance nurse leaders' participation in health policy development. A Delphi survey was applied which included the following criteria: expert panelists, iterative rounds, statistical analysis, and consensus building. The expert panelists were purposively selected and included national nurse leaders in leadership positions at the nursing professional associations, nursing regulatory bodies, ministries of health, and universities in East Africa. The study was conducted in three iterative rounds. The results reported here were gathered as part of the first round of the study and that examined the extent of nurse leaders' participation in health policy development. Seventy-eight (78) expert panelists were invited to participate in the study, and the response rate was 47%. Data collection was done with the use of a self-report questionnaire. Data analysis was done by use of SPSS and descriptive statistics were examined. The findings indicated that nurse leaders participate in health policy development though participation is limited and not consistent across all the stages of health policy development. The recommendations from the findings are that health policy development process needs to be pluralistic and inclusive of all nurse leaders practicing in positions related to policy development and the process must be open to their ideas and suggestions.