Satsuki Hagiwara
The University of Tokyo
April , 2022
Abstract
This paper focuses on Japanese teachers’ anxiety toward Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Since the impact of COVID-19 insists us the importance of each person’s transformation in their actions and behaviors. Implementing ESD has been expected as one of the ways to emphasize one’s transformative attitude in the educational system. Japan currently revised the national curriculum to enhance nurturing “builders of a sustainable society.” However, a lot of issues concerned with ESD remained unsolved which previous researchers have pointed out for more than 10 years. Thus, this paper firstly conducted focus group interviews as preliminary research which result in investigating current issues regarding ESD from teachers’ perspectives also and suggesting that teachers have some sort of anxiety toward ESD implementation. Afterward, individual interviews with 7 teachers were conducted to investigate teachers’ anxiety and its factors. The research suggested that there are three different anxieties; anxiety regard with lesson practice, anxiety towards colleagues, and anxiety toward students. Moreover, there are two factors of anxieties; developmental levels and educational levels. To sum up, the research proposed teachers are having some sort of anxiety in ESD implementation.
