Predictors of Motivation and Barriers to ICT-Enabling Education for Sustainability

Abstract

There is an increasing interest and effort in reorienting university curricula to address sustainability and preparing teachers to get involved in embedding sustainability and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in teaching and curricula enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Evidence shows that this interest and effort is often prevented by various barriers at three levels: teacher- level barriers, school-level barriers, and system-level barriers. In this study, the attempt was geared towards identifying the constituencies of these three levels of barriers and examining the extent to which they predict teachers’ motivation to embed sustainability and SDGs in various school subject areas, including arts-based education. A survey of 1253 teachers in Malaysia revealed that the teacher- and system-level barriers explain 83% of the motivation variance. By identifying, addressing, and investigating these barriers, higher education institutions—and especially teacher education—could be better informed in reorienting university curricula to embed ICT-enabled Education for Sustainability (ICTeEfS). These results were also used in planning and implementing in-service teacher training interventions in the context of a European Commission Erasmus+-funded project.