Posted on December, 11 2014

WWF has initiated the whole school approach in 12 selected schools in four states of the country. To help teachers understand what ESD is and how to impart it, WWF developed a handbook titled Methodologies for the future: A guide to develop education for sustainable development. This valuable resource not only introduces teachers to the concepts of sustainable development, education for sustainable development, action competence, whole school approach and concepts in learning, but also provides tools and methods to help them apply these concepts and practise them in their own teachinglearning environment.

The handbook, published in English, Hindi and four regional languages namely Axomiya, Bangla,Malayalam and Kannada, is available at WWF-India. This manual complements the handbook and helps schools assess how far they have succeeded in adopting a whole school approach. It is divided into five development areas, namely, school culture and ethos, teaching and learning, community engagement, the school estate, and monitoring and evaluation. It provides a checklist of questions, most of which have to be answered in Yes or No. Each response has scores assigned to it so that you can add them up to assess where your school stands in each of the development areas as well as overall, how effective your efforts have been, and identify areas that need to be strengthened, issues that need to be taken up immediately and those that need to be addressed in the longer term. The questions also work as pointers to areas of operation and some concrete steps that you could pursue and undertake to make your school a model ESD school.

Original report dated: 24.11.2014