Environmental education and education for sustainable development in the training of Education graduates

Documents produced within the scope of several international conferences have enhanced the importance of universities with regard to the promotion of Environment Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). According to those documents, universities should develop research on those domains as well as reorganize their curricula in order to include those issues. In order to attend those guidelines which are stressed by the documents that support the United Nations Declaration on ESD, several universities have put into practice that recommendation by creating some courses on those issues. In Portugal, this has happened at the University of Minho that included a course on Education and Sustainable Development in the undergraduate programme in Education. The goal is that students that graduate from this programme are able to diagnose socioeconomic and environmental problems as well as to critically analyse and design educational actions to reduce or prevent them. The research reported in this paper aims at analysing the evolution of students' conceptions on EE and on ESD, as well as the fulfillment of their expectations regarding the questions to be approached in an under graduation ESD course.