The University Jaume I of Castellon (Spain) launched the “ImpSDGup” course in 2017. The aim of this training course on professional education for sustainable development (ESD) skills and competences for higher education teachers is to help academics in reorienting their subjects’ curricula in order to contribute to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030. The “ImpSDGup” course is based on the Training Model in Transformative Action for Sustainability (TMTAS) model that is structured in three main areas: the content on sustainability, the theoretical approaches, and the ESD teaching and learning methodologies. In this paper, we describe the design and the contents of the training course and we investigate the changes that participants of the course implemented in the design of their subject programs. The methodology of the study was based on content analysis. The main results show that most of the 55 university teachers that undertook the course in its three editions succeeded in transforming course objectives and that they incorporated some of the SDGs and several ESD active learning methodologies in their teaching. As a consequence of this, we consider that the course helps in enhancing university teachers’ ESD professional competences.

The current crisis of unsustainability has renewed academic interest in sustainable global citizenship. Classical approaches to this type of citizenship have turned out to be quite abstract, utopian, and naive. This article is a theoretical reflection on sustainable global citizenship from a critical realist perspective, with the aim of bringing realism and pragmatism to the personal and social transformations necessary to achieve sustainability. The contribution of this work consists of the proposal of a conceptual framework that is structured by the following five key dimensions of citizenship: governance, status, social-ecological systems, social conscience, and engagement. These dimensions have been interpreted and described from two core ideas of critical realism: the position-practice system and the seven-scalar laminated system. The main conclusions are that agency-structure dualism requires more comprehensive approaches that integrate self-awareness of all the components that intervene in the autonomous decision to act, and that include personal capabilities, the desire and motivation to get engaged, and the real possibility of participating determined by the social context and the personal situation. It is also necessary to increase the number of types of agencies, especially with the recognition of the group as a key entity. The resolution of the dichotomy on state-global scale relationships can be articulated by differentiating between government and governance, and the role of social innovation in the latter.

The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 have created renewed interest in sustainability in education. Geography education is a discipline that studies most of the issues related to the SDGs and has a significant role to play in the Anthropocene. Current debates on curricular sustainability and geography education suggest that geography educators are integrating sustainability in different ways but not all approaches have the same transformative impact. The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical model that determines different levels of transformation that could be helpful for advancing in curricular sustainability in geography education. The proposed model is called The Transformative Sustainable Curricula (TSC) model. Its development has relied on two processes that have involved, at the same time, two different methodologies: the creation of the model through documentary analysis, and its validation from interviews with experts in education for sustainability and geography education. The model is structured in three levels or stages: adaptation, reform and transformation. Each level has been characterized according to the following elements: the perspectives of sustainable development; the type of sustainable education; transformative learning; ecology of knowledge; institutional integration; context, change and community. The proposal makes teachers aware of where their teaching practice is located and how to move forward. It is also useful to determine what elements constitute a prop for sustainability and how these can guide educators and scholars in scaling vertically and horizontally their contribution towards a geographic education that is more sustainable and transformative, should they wish to do so.

El conocimiento avanza a medida que se formulan nuevas y buenas preguntas. El presente texto pretende evidenciar la importancia de las preguntas en el avance tanto epistemológico como didáctico de la enseñanza de la geografía. Así, el artículo tiene un doble objetivo: por una parte, se reflexiona sobre la naturaleza de la geografía escolar y se hace una propuesta de cuáles son las grandes cuestiones geográficas de la actualidad. Por otro lado, se considera que plantear buenos interrogantes es una estrategia de gran valor didáctico, puesto que ayuda a alcanzar una mejor comprensión de los fenómenos y crea conciencia. En este aspecto, el texto pretende guiar acerca de cómo formular buenas preguntas, tanto por parte del profesorado como del alumnado, y además aporta una propuesta de diferenciación de tipos de preguntas geográficas según el nivel de demanda intelectual y cognitiva.