Sustainability education (SE) is included in school curricula to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development (SD) into all education. This study investigates lower secondary school subject teachers as educators for sustainability. A survey was used to study the perceptions of 442 subject teachers from 49 schools in Finland. There were significant differences between the subject teachers’ perceptions of their SE competence, and the frequency with which they used different dimensions of SE (ecological, economic, social, well-being, cultural) in their teaching varied. Teachers’ age had a small effect, but gender, school, and its residential location were nonsignificant factors. Teachers could be roughly classified into three different subgroups according to their perceptions of the role of SE in their teaching; those who considered three SE dimensions rather often and used holistic sustainability approaches in their teaching (biology, geography, history); those who considered two or three dimensions often but were not active in holistic teaching (mother tongue, religion, visual arts, crafts, music, physical and health education, and home economics) and those who used one SE dimension or consider only one holistic approach in their teaching (mathematics, physics, chemistry and language). Subject teachers’ awareness of their SE competence is important to encourage them to plan and implement discipline-based and interdisciplinary SE in their teaching. The specific SE expertise of subject teachers should be taken into account in teacher training and education.

Interest in biology and the out-of-school experiences of Finnish secondary school pupils (n=3626, median age 15) were surveyed in the spring of 2003 using the international ROSE questionnaire. Likert-scaled items were categorised with an explorative factor analysis. The scores of eight interest-context factors and seven out-of-school experience factors were studied. More boys than girls were interested in basic processes in biology, whilst more girls than boys found human biology and health education interesting. Out-of-school nature experiences were the most important factor correlating with interest in biology. Out-of-school experiences in science and technology-related activities, such as using science kits and constructing models, had the highest correlation with an interest in basic processes in biology, such as ecology, cell biology and genetics. Out-of-school experiences of caring for farm animals correlated with an interest in applied biology, such as agriculture. Experiences linked to design and technology, or information technology, were the least important factors to correlate with any studied interest contexts. Thus to enhance pupils' interest in learning more about biology and the living environment in general, it is important to put more emphasis on pupils' out-of-school nature experience and their engagement in informal learning in contextual outdoor environments.