Even though the urge to transform educational practices towards sustainability has been widely recognized, teachers struggle with implementing socioscientific issues (SSI) such as climate change and loss of biodiversity into their lessons. While the research on SSI grows, the literature remains limited in terms of (i) the use of SSI in facilitating education for sustainable development (ESD), and (ii) teachers’ professional learning of SSI-based instruction as a means towards ESD. In this empirical study, we aimed at characterizing five STEM pre-service teachers’ pedagogical design capacity (PDC) by focusing on what resources they use and how they interact with these resources to design SSI-based instruction to teach about the sustainable development goals (SDGs). For this qualitative study, the data were collected through field notes, reflection reports, and semi-structured interviews. Our results reveal that pre-service teachers referred to teacher resources the most, followed by collaborative resources, and instructional resources during their design. Even though their use of resources shows strong connections between SSI and their pedagogical content knowledge, preservice teachers’ consideration regarding assessment remains inadequate. Furthermore, our study shows that professional development sessions have the potential to foster pre-service teachers’ use of PDC resources to address ESD.

In this study, Q methodology was used to identify 16 secondary school physics, chemistry, and biology teachers' views on competences in education for sustainable development (ESD). Our data collection instrument was grounded in the GreenComp competence framework developed by the European Commission. We captured three different viewpoints through by‐person factor analysis. The largest group, with nine science teachers, prioritized promoting evidence‐based instruction while avoiding the political, ethical, or value‐laden dilemmas inherent in sustainability issues. While they advocated addressing critical thinking and system thinking, their reasons for avoiding the dilemmas varied. Some teachers feared that addressing such dilemmas might lead to preaching their own values to students, while others felt unprepared or believed that science should remain objective and value‐free. The second largest group, with four science teachers, emphasize promoting nature and its well‐being above all other competences. Unlike the dominant group, this group of science teachers held themselves responsible for encouraging students to care for nature and to change their attitudes to behave more sustainably. The third group of teachers stood out by advocating fostering collective action in science education. While all teachers agreed on the importance of promoting foundational scientific knowledge, they also agreed on excluding politics from science education. This stance was influenced by internal factors, such as their perception of science as empirical, their perceived role as transmitters of scientific knowledge, and a lack of expertise. In total, 12 out of the 16 teachers who participated in our study suggested that subjects such as history are more suitable for addressing certain ESD competences. Additionally, external factors, such as the role of parents and assessments, were cited as potential reasons to dismiss certain ESD competences in science education.