Facilitating the development of students’ generic green skills in TVET: An ESD pedagogical model

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) plays a significant role in supporting green economic restructuring as well as tackling environmental problems through skills development. Generic green skills play an important role among required skills, as they are necessary for all occupations to ensure environmental friendly workplace practices, and as a consequence they should be addressed in the TVET curriculum. The pedagogy needed to facilitate the development of these green skills is an emerging research area worldwide.
This paper considers pedagogy for education for sustainable development (ESD) as a broad framework that can enhance the development of generic green skills. It examines current theories and a selection of practices related to ESD pedagogy and analyses pedagogical approaches commonly used in ESD curricula. It also reports on the results of a pilot study that revealed a significant gap between the pedagogical approaches put forward in the literature and ESD pedagogical practices within the context of TVET.
Based on ESD pedagogy analyses and the results of the pilot study, this paper puts forward a pedagogical model designed to support generic green skills development. It suggests a problemoriented and project-based pedagogical framework that brings real-world learning opportunities into the classroom as a pedagogical approach, which has the potential to enhance the development of students’ generic green skills. Copyright © 2019 Pavlova / Chen.