A move to teacher standards : promoting excellence in environmental and sustainability education

For the past decade professional teaching associations have been progressively developing teacher and/or teaching standards and associated professional learning and assessment models in the key discipline areas. The underlying ethos of this approach is to capture the depth and range of accomplished educators' teaching. Despite the increasing work on teacher standards in Australia, currently there are no professional teacher standards in environmental education. Up until the implementation of the Waste Wise and Sustainable Schools initiatives there was little or no recognition of environmental / sustainability education practice in Australia. To these ends, this article is about the recent developments in environmental education concerning the advance of professional teaching standards and learning in Australia. The paper is based upon a pilot project being driven and funded by Monash University, the Australian Association for Environmental Education and the Gould Group to develop and implement appropriate professional teacher standards and professional learning models with and for teachers.