Moving towards transdisciplinarity: an ecological sustainable focus for science and mathematics pre‐service education in the primary/middle years

One reason we have difficulty finding sustainable solutions is in part because we are unable to see the bigger picture. Capra (2000 Capra, F. 2000. The challenge of our time.. Resurgence, 203: 18–20. [Google Scholar]) argues, “To become ecologically literate we must learn to think systemically – in terms of connectedness, context and processes” (p. 270). We have attempted to structure connected learning experiences through our transdisciplinary approach to teaching for learning science, mathematics and ecological aspects of society and environment. We support Jucker's (2002 Jucker, R. 2002. Our common illiteracy: Education as if the Earth and people mattered, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]) view that we must have lateral rigor across disciplines and vertical rigor within disciplines in order to best prepare students for teaching. This paper explores the theoretical underpinning of this complex approach to undergraduate teaching and reports on how our teaching team has worked collaboratively to structure a sequence of three, one semester integrated, core courses that explicitly uses an educating for ecological sustainability theme as the basis for each course and associated assessment.