But first and foremost our message [sustainable development] is directed towards people, whose well-being is the ultimate goal of all environment and development policies. In particular, the Commission is addressing the young. The world's teachers will have a central role to play in bringing this to them Teacher education programs need to produce professionals who not only teach sustainability themes but also can "pull together" the various disciplinary strands that will give their students a holistic understanding of a sustainable future and the role of individuals, communities, and nations in a sustainable world. Then we move to developing an ESD Program with Community Participation,Engaging Traditional Disciplines in a Trans disciplinary Framework, Sharing the Responsibility, Building Human Capacity.
What steps do I take if aim of my research is to develop a model for addressing an educational issue? For instance, a model for enhancing skill acquisition among students
Depending on your research problem, research objective(s), research questions as well as the model you want to develop, following are 3 suggestions:
Quantitative Research - if there is adequate research on certain constructs / independent variables (IV) from literature review e.g. Intrinsic motivation, social economic status, peers rivalry etc, you can develop a conceptual framework / research model to point those hypothesized IVs to the "Student's Skill Acquisition" construct / dependent variable (DV). After this, you can perform data collection & the needed analyses to test the hypotheses.
Qualitative Research - you can perform some in-dept interviews, observations etc. with students or students' parents etc. to discover a new model why & how some factors under-research that contribute to "Student's Skill Acquisition".
Qualitative then to Quantitative Research (Mixed Method Research called Sequential Exploratory Design) - this can be continuity of research from the above #2 whereby after you discovered some factors contributing to "Student's Skill Acquisition" & you want to generalize the model to entire population of students in your country etc., then you can perform a quantitative research as depicted in above #1. This model developed in option #3 will be more solid as it gone through the rigor of both qualitative & quantitative research.