Rationale

One of the most visible side-effects of Asia’s rapid growth has been environmental damage. Recent climate-related disasters in the region show that Asian policy makers must act now to protect their citizens and mitigate and reverse the impacts of climate change to secure sustainable growth for the future. A way to rise to these challenges is through education for sustainability (EfS). While there is commitment of Asian leaders for EfS along with their concern for the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the real change makers are the teachers in the classroom.

Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam are among the Asian countries, whose teaching force needs training to address the challenges posed by ICTs, climate change and other environmental threats. On the one hand, faculties of education need to reconstruct their study programs by integrating ICT-enabled Education for Sustainability (ICTeEfS) and, on the other hand, they have to capitalize on the potential of such technologies in advancing EfS to all subject in-service teachers. ICT literacy and rapidly growing availability of ICT infrastructure in the PCs makes the integration of ICT in the curriculum of teacher education programs and in-service training inevitable. However, integration of ICT does not merely mean an addition of ICT as a subject or tool. It implies changes about teaching and learning and requires comprehensive and integrative planning of the ICT-enabled EfS in teacher education.

Our needs analysis indicated that ICT teacher training programs in the partner countries often focus on the mechanics of ICT use rather than on ways to design curricular applications that would take advantage of the potential of ICT to bring about changes in the teaching and learning process and the curriculum. ICT coordinators have a huge responsibility in managing ICT matters, including the facilities, hardware and software, monitoring ICT activities, but much less on contributing to teachers’ professional development due to their lack of relevant training. It is thus a great challenge to tackle this problem and turn ICT coordinators into effective education leaders locally.

Most in-service training efforts are of short duration workshops (of 3 or 5 days), which act more as ad-hoc ‘orientation’ opportunities rather than sustained capacity-building processes of orienting teachers to EfS. There are also disparities within the partner countries, in particular, between rural-urban areas that affect the accessibility of teachers serving rural areas to their professional development. There is thus need for: 1) a shift of the current teaching/learning, mostly focusing on transmissive pedagogies to more constructivist and transformative pedagogies and 2) an alternative in-service teacher professional development program enabled by blended learning, taking into consideration all these gaps, barriers and neglected issues.