ABSTRACT
Training of teachers to act as agents in bringing about current social changes has been regarded as a worldwide priority (UNESCO 2004). Against a background of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), there is a debate about teacher training. According to Leff (2001), ESD should feature in an interdisciplinary, cross-sectional and holistic way in both formal and nonformal education and thus become a key factor in the search for sustainability. Undergraduate courses have an important role in training professionals who will work in ESD. There are several studies dealing with environmental issues in Bachelor and Technology degree courses, including areas not traditionally linked to ESD, such as biology and geography (Kawasaki et al. 2009). According to Grindsted (2011), several statements on Higher Education for Sustainable
Development (HESD) were formulated. These statements have promoted progress and implementation of ESD in higher education institutions, enabling the creation of networks (Gutiérrez and González 2005) and expanding academic research (Adomßent et al. 2014), especially in Europe, North America and Australia (Barth and Rieckmann 2013; Stevenson et al. 2013). As a result, there has been a significant growth of academic research into Environmental Education (EE)1 and this was particularly striking at the beginning of the 1990s. It is estimated that there were more than 3,000 dissertations and theses on EE produced in Brazil between 1987 and 2012 (Megid Neto 2010; Carvalho et al. 2013). However, such output is not studied as a whole and their findings cannot contribute to the transformation of formal or non-formal ESD. This lack of review on research in Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) is also mentioned by Barth and Rieckmann (2013); and in this Handbook, Chapter 7. Thus, this research aims at analysing what has been produced on curricular greening of undergraduate courses, between 1987 and 2009. We will examine the main pedagogical and curricular trends appointed by these studies. This research is closely linked to the EArte Project – Environmental Education in Brazil: An
Analysis of Academic Studies (Dissertations and Theses), developed by research groups from three Brazilian public universities: São Paulo State University (UNESP), University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and University of São Paulo (USP). The project involved a survey of theses and dissertations produced in Brazil on EE and the development of an analytical catalogue of this production together with several meta-analytical studies (Carvalho et al. 2013).
