Environmentally educated teachers

This chapter examines the persistent idea that educating teachers to enable them to practise environmental education should be a priority. It also explores why this has proved so difficult to bring about in practice. The need for environmentally educated teachers was a key point in the 1977 Tbilisi Declaration. Extensive competences for such teachers were set out in the 1980s. These were foundational ones in professional education, and competencies in environmental education content. The competences were seen as both universal in applicability, but only as starting points for contextually appropriate professional development. The chapter sets the competencies out in full and concludes that it is time to take them seriously.