Tracing Sustainability: An International Comparison of ESD Implementation into Lower Secondary Education

Abstract

With the progress of the DESD, increasing numbers of researchers have been developing indicators to effectively measure the implementation of ESD in formal, informal and non-formal education. This paper aims to measure the implementation of ESD in secondary school curricula in three countries carrying the fingerprints of a developed (Germany), post-colonial (Mexico) and post-socialist (Romania) condition. The authors tested a set of four indicators measuring the depth and breadth of implementation. The results show that ESD continues to exist as (hyper-) specialized add-on knowledge in an overcrowded curriculum (Jucker, 2011) that seems to further differentiate between high- and low-status knowledge (Williams, 2008). The tested indicators offer an insight into the depth and breadth of ESD implementation across the entire curriculum.