As an instructional approach, sustainability education is relevant to the whole curriculum,
rather than a single content area (Nolet, 2009). Interdisciplinary, there are substantial
applications to all subject areas across all grade levels (McClanahan, 2014), with the most
obvious application in social studies. There is no framework designed specifically for analyzing
pre-service teachers’ perceptions and teaching beliefs related to sustainability education. The
Sustainability Education Framework for Teachers (SEFT) (Arizona Board of Regents, 2014)
offers a sound conceptual framework for examining sustainability education with elementary
pre-service teachers. This framework includes the requisite knowledge, skills, and dispositions to
confront and to develop solutions to sustainability issues such as plastic pollution. There are four
interconnected approaches: Futures Thinking; Values Thinking; Systems Thinking; and Strategic
Thinking, as outlined in Table 1.