Development of TVET teachers’ career identity through teacher education and training programs for the purposes of including ESD in classroom practices

This paper has two starting points. First is the recently approved document, Implementation plan of vocational education reform issued by the General Office of the State Council of China (2019). One aspect of this reform is specifically related to the quality of TVET teachers. It requires the TVET sector to develop a unified approach towards selecting and educating TVET teachers at the national level. The second is China’s resolve to follow a path of sustainable development (Zhang & Wen 2008). The government emphasizes the need to reduce environmental pollution and develop innovative approaches towards minimizing the use of energy and materials in all economic sectors and to establish step-by-step measures to implement these approaches (Tianbao & Fang 2018). As a result of these two developments, TVET teachers need to incorporate the knowledge and skills required for education for sustainable development (ESD) into their classroom/workshop practice that are relevant to their own specific specializations (Zhang et al. 2017). However, this creates significant challenges in terms of teacher training, as there is a lack of discussion about how to motivate teachers to address SD issues and to apply what they know about ESD into their teaching practices (Borg, Gericke, Höglund, & Bergman, 2012). This article argues that career identity theories provide principles that can be used to design teacher education and training programs to cultivate teachers’ motivation and commitment to ESD. The authors put forward a model that consists of six components, which can be included in educational programs for TVET teacher s with the specific aim of implementing ESD in TVET. Copyright © 2019 KANG/PAVLOVA.