The International Christian University (ICU) has been addressing the international collaborative development of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at elementary and secondary schools in collaboration with the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa in an academic exchange program that was concluded the year before last (2008).

The following are some of the reasons why it was commenced upon: One is that the Mitaka Municipal Osawadai Elementary School, Hanesawa Elementary School, and Seventh Junior High School, which are all located close to the ICU, collaboratively form the "Osawa Gakuen" that is involved in the promotion of general education utilizing local features as a consecutive educational entity from the primary through to early secondary level. They study the environment and local industries in particular. The Nogawa River that flows near the schools and its surrounding area incorporates the Musashino wilderness area, which is a valuable place to study the natural environment. At the time "Environmental Research" was just made available as a new major at ICU, and therefore the issue is being focused upon on by the entire university.

In addition Education for Sustainable Development for Africa (ESDA) was also established at the United Nations University in which the ICU staff is deeply involved. Moreover, the Science Council of Japan had just finished pinpointing "Science Technology Literacy" as part of the fundamental education that will be required by citizens of the 21st century and were also involved in "Science Literacy Cafe" activities in establishing science literacy for citizens in the Mitaka region using the important themes of water, food, and climatic changes. The "Tokyo International Science Festival" has also been held in the Mitaka region since 2009, which was used to promote civil activities in thinking together about our surroundings through science.

The UCT also had Department of School Education Support that supported neighborhood elementary and secondary school education, and in particular science and environmental education. In both Mitaka and Cape Town environmental education in cooperation with the university and the local community has already been promoted.

Why exactly did the two of them, who are quite different in terms of distance, history, culture, and natural environment conditions, challenge the collaborative development of education? The reason for that is that we had a hypothesis which we wanted to verify. That hypothesis was: Sustainability is not only a local issue but also a global one at the same time. The most important thing in ESD is to aid children to actually understand that people from very different natural environments, societies, and cultures are all living together on the earth. We now live in the kind of era where any variations in a country or region immediately spread throughout the world due to the development of methods of the transportation and information technology. The new type of influenza and the recent global financial crisis made us all realize that variations in a region can immediately involve the global situation.

The greenhouse gases and international rivers issues are also problems that cannot be settled by a single country or region. We are challenging a structure and practice of an educational program through which both teachers and pupils in Japan and South Africa can learn together collaboratively in the development of the program to verify our hypothesis.

UCT actually selected the local support schools in the autumn of 2008, with seven team members from Japan being dispatched abroad in March, 2009. The Japan members consisted of one ICU teacher, two postgraduate students, two elementary school teachers, and one junior high school teacher of Osawa Gakuen, along with a photographer who visited two local elementary schools and a junior high school, and investigated activities taking place at the Department of School Education Support at the University of Cape Town. They also visited the Sustainability Institute of Stellenbosch University where a glimpse of the high awareness they had on sustainability education and the deployment of research in South Africa was enabled. The Sustainability Institute in particular has actually created a recycling town and we were very impressed with their practical research that integrated science technology into social science.

An essential point in the concept of sustainability in South Africa is correcting the inequalities that exist in society as well as conserving the natural environment and maintaining the necessary levels of resources and energy, or that is, it aims at the harmonic development of humans as well as that of nature and human beings. As mentioned above we have actually held onsite workshops with the teachers of local elementary and junior high schools and the officers in charge of the Ministry of Education in South Africa to discuss the concept of the international collaborative development of the ESD module. This then resulted in the discovery being made that we shared the same concept of the need for harmony between nature and humans, and humans and other humans, and the decision that we would develop a common education program with the particular theme of "soil and water".

In 2009 we reviewed the program that could deploy in classes several times with the theme of "soil and water" in aiming to develop a comprehensive study program which would enable the pupils to grow aware of the similarities and differences in both countries in terms of soil and water in their different natural environments by relating them to living, life, and industry. In July 2009 two elementary school teachers and one instructor from the University of Cape Town visited Japan from South Africa. They inspected the education that was being made available at Osawa Gakuen and held a workshop on developing a common module. In August 2009 we dispatched some teachers to South Africa where they actually taught some of the children in cooperation with South African teachers for the first time. We then both took part in some "classroom based research" with other teachers sitting in on the class. To our surprise class improvement activities such as team teaching and class room based research, which is taken for granted in Japan, were a first in the history of South Africa. It was also a great discovery that sound practices from the Japanese education system like this were so highly evaluated in South Africa.

In December, 2009 we publicly performed an ESD program that incorporated the results of research carried out at Osawa Gakuen and then also held a symposium. Moreover, taking the results into consideration enabled the opportunity to directly discuss exactly what the pupils in both countries had learned on February 25 of this year through a video link. It was also the first time for the pupils of both countries to actually talk with the others: They introduced their own natural environments through interpretations made by ICU undergraduate and postgraduate students or occasionally reading a scenario they had written in English. They were able to discuss what each of them could do for nature in an empathetic manner.

We are planning to disseminate an improved "water and soil" education model that has been recently organized over the past one and half years and put the structure of the ESD model into practice at the junior high school, which possibly could also be deployed at the high school and university too.

Pupils of Hanesawa Elementary School answering a question from an elementary school pupil in South Africa

(Photo taken by International Christian University)

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