The role of educational leadership to promote the culture for sustainability within educational institutions

The effects of unregulated economic and industrial progress have led the international community to reflect on the serious consequences caused at an environmental and social level such as: pollution and destruction of natural ecosystems, inequalities, the exhaustion of natural resources, economic crises and wars, global population growth. Therefore, in 2015, the need to face these increasingly complex challenges drove the international community to define an ambitious action program contained in the 2030 Agenda, whose 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are shared by 193 Member States, precisely because the guarantee of sustainable development requires commitment and assumption of responsibility by all States and all organizations. Such a vision, however, requires reorienting the education of all nations to be able to develop knowledge, skills, perspectives, and values, to give all people of all ages the opportunity to take responsibility for creating and inhabiting a sustainable future (UNESCO, 2004). Considering the role attributed to education, a decisive role for the development of successful education for sustainability must be given to educational leaders who can be key agents for the creation of school organizations for sustainability and for meaningful teaching and learning processes (Leithwood et al., 2004). An educational leader who wants to create an organization guided by the culture of sustainability has the responsibility to (a) support his teachers in developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions that the pedagogy for sustainability requires; (b) promote practices that can reflect the philosophy of/towards sustainability; (c) build the school as a social actor by promoting alliances with the community, to ensure the achievement of common objectives for a sustainable future (Kadji-Beltran et al., 2013). Creating a sustainable school requires rethinking school functioning in a holistic way, including the curriculum, teaching/learning processes, resource management and collaborative approaches both within and outside school boundaries. This means adopting a whole-school approach (Henderson & Tilbury 2004) to start a transformative journey capable of creating coherence between pedagogical, organizational, and social culture, physical spaces, the use and management of resources. For an educational institution, the adoption of the whole-school approach model implies to make the effort to minimize the gap between the declared values and the practices implemented. Therefore, the concept of sustainable school therefore coincides with a holistic approach to education for sustainable development (ESD), since its principles should be part of the ordinary transformative and improvement process of the school and not an optional or alternative perspective; it should concern the construction of learning environments and experiences useful for engaging students in practice, contributing to the construction of a more sustainable society and a better quality of life (Gough, 2005); it should present itself as a model of sustainable life, operationalizing democratic governance and an inclusive culture. This implies that leaders of educational institutions have to play the role of agents of change since they have a position that allows them to shape the organizational structure and build the conditions for the implementation of innovative planning and successful practices. ESD requires the implementation of a holistic change in the organization guided by the adoption of a leadership style that orients and promotes transformation rather than adaptation, which looks to a sustainable future from an interdisciplinary perspective, based on an effective collaboration at the governance level. In this sense, transformative leadership becomes vital for the implementation of ESD, but 85 itself sustainability requires a change of leadership paradigm. This can be achieved in the implementation of those components identified by Hargreaves and Fink (2006) in the construction of shared actions, in the ability to share responsibilities, to promote learning, to collaborate and cooperate with others in the promotion of education for sustainability (EfS). Therefore, the education for sustainability requires leadership that can create a vision of change and motivate people to participate in the implementation of sustainable processes (Scott, Tilbury, Sharp, & Deane, 2012), to negotiate change with various local agencies and the internal and external community, to create sustainable practices that truly respond to the needs of the reality. Although in Italian schools there are initiatives and experiences in favor of sustainability education, there are no specific studies on the role of leadership for ESD in educational institutions. To fill this gap this study aims to respond to the following questions “What perceptions do the participating principals have of their leadership and of the actions implemented to promote sustainability education according to the 2030 Agenda’s values?” To respond to the research question the northern Italian schools’ principals were invited to respond to an open question questionnaire that was ad hoc created. Data collected from the 51 participants showed that principals are aware of their role and leadership in promoting the development of sustainability mindset: they include goals and initiatives for sustainability in all the institutional documents, making more effort on those that are regulated by specific norms. However, much more effort needs to be done before considering EfS as a holist approach that characterize values, culture and practice of the whole educational community.