Promoting proper education for sustainability: An exploratory study of ICT enhanced Problem Based Learning in a developing country

One of the goals of education is to create responsible citizens who can adequately understand the problems faced by their societies and who can then act to help solve them. Such behaviour can be fostered through proper education that facilitates expert knowledge about social issues, nurtures the ability to think critically and learns the skills needed to pro-actively search for possible solutions. Through this study we aimed to develop an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) supported pedagogical framework, Children as Agents of Social Change (CASC), as a possible vehicle to facilitate appropriate education about social issues. This article analyses the first implementation of the CASC framework carried out at schools in Tanzania. Forest fires in Tanzania are often caused by human activity and education about this pressing problem needs to be provisioned on a large scale. However, due to a lack of teachers and teacher expertise, this is not the reality. With help of the local community, we created a locally contextualised video supported by a Problem Based Learning (PBL) solution to connect local forest experts with school students. These students then creatively conducted PBL activities in order to help solve local environmental and conservation problems. Data was collected through pre- and post-tests of control-experimental groups and teacher interviews. Results suggest that the participants were enlightened as to a variety of active problem solving possibilities and that they ranked the CASC methodology as an effective approach to sustainability.