The RSP Framework
In order to work towards a more just and sustainable world, the educator ideally needs to have sustainability competences themselves and be able to develop them within their learners.
That means that the educator needs to have:
- a critical understanding of sustainable development
- a grounding in the pedagogy of education for sustainable development (ESD).
A Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) is designed to address the second of these points while contributing to the first.
The RSP framework consists of twelve educator competences that can be used as the basis of a training programme and/or to assess educators who wish to improve their capabilities in relation to ESD. As any experienced educator knows, education is as much an art as a science and for this reason we display the competences both on an artist’s palette and in a table format. Both are valid ways of approaching the development of competences in educators.
Each competence has three Learning Outcomes, beneath these there are a number of Underpinning Components. You can access these by clicking on the competence name on the palette or the table. You will also find a link to activities that we have used to help develop each competence. In addition, you will find a link to references that we have drawn upon to guide our thinking and/or to share with our students.
RSP takes a broad view of what competence means. We see it as something that grows out of practice and increasing knowledge, both of which are underpinned by values that drive us to improve our practice. The RSP framework encourages educators to practice an action-oriented, transformative pedagogy that engages learners in participative, systemic, creative and critical thinking and acting processes, all of which is illustrated by the activities on this website.