Based on findings from a study of beginning teachers’ concepts of professionalism in Jamaica, this paper argues for the development of pedagogy in teacher education to address sustainability. The findings indicate that at the core of beginning teachers’ concept of the teacher as a professional is that of the teacher as a change agent. What these teachers mean when they speak of change agents and change agency is the subject of this paper.

Since the 20th celebration of the Earth Summit, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, many journals, disciplines, and people are reflecting on the progress towards sustainable development in the last two decades. Although there has been progress on many fronts, the threats to global sustainability are large and growing.

The Schools' Environment Programme (SEP) is a civil society led ten-year-old school-based environmental education programme implemented in the island of Jamaica. It was started in 1997 by two non-governmental environmental agencies, the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) and the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust (JCDT), which independently conduct similar education programmes in schools.

Divergent discourses in education affecting social investment policies are driven by disparate perceptions of education as value, whether societal, individual, or by restructuring definitions of human capital beyond truncated utility measurements. In that context, powerful policy actors are making decisions based on their class cohort experience of what education should be, resulting in distinguishing evaluative properties that design education policy typologies to fit.