Beliefs Beat Knowledge: What Drives Sustainable Teaching in Iraqi Universities

What makes a university teacher actually bring sustainability into the classroom? A new study from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq offers a surprisingly clear answer: it is not what instructors know, but what they believe. Researchers surveyed 105 English language instructors working across higher education institutions in the region and found that while both knowledge and values predicted sustainability-related teaching practices, values were by far the stronger driver. The finding, published in Discover Education, carries implications far beyond one region, because it suggests that training programmes built purely on facts and definitions may be missing the point.

The study, led by Saja Adnan of the University of Diyala together with colleagues at the University of Garmian and Lebanese French University, set out to measure three things among English as a foreign language instructors: their awareness of Education for Sustainable Development, their values towards it, and their actual classroom practices. Education for Sustainable Development, or ESD, is the United Nations-backed idea that education should equip learners with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes needed to make responsible choices for the environment, economy and society. It sits at the heart of the fourth Sustainable Development Goal on quality education, and universities worldwide are increasingly expected to embed it across every discipline, including language teaching.

The theoretical backbone of the research was the Knowledge, Values and Practices model, developed by the French didactics researcher Pierre Clément. The model treats scientific knowledge, personal values and social practices as three interacting poles, and predicts that knowledge and values together shape professional behaviour through a process called didactic transposition, in which disciplinary knowledge is transformed to make it teachable. The researchers complemented this with Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory, which describes how people revise their assumptions through critical reflection and gradually convert new perspectives into new actions. Together, the two frameworks allowed the team to ask not just what instructors knew and felt, but where they stood on the journey from awareness to action.

Methodologically, the study was a quantitative, cross-sectional survey. The team built a 26-item questionnaire: five demographic questions and nineteen Likert-scale items divided into knowledge, values and practices subscales. The instrument was reviewed by four experts in environmental science, research methodology, higher education pedagogy and teacher training, then piloted with ten teachers. Confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS software supported the questionnaire’s construct validity, and reliability was strong, with an overall Cronbach’s alpha of 0.90 and subscale values between 0.85 and 0.87. Data were collected online over one month in July 2025 via the JISC survey platform, with participants giving informed consent before responding. Because instructors were recruited by convenience sampling, the authors caution that the findings cannot be generalised beyond the participating institutions.

The sample itself reflected the demographics of the region’s rapidly expanding university sector. Just over half of respondents were women, nearly six in ten were aged between 30 and 39, and 70.5 percent held a master’s degree. About a third had five to ten years of teaching experience, and more than two-thirds worked at public institutions. This is a young, professionally trained workforce teaching in a higher education system that has grown from a handful of universities to more than fifty public and private institutions in two decades, while still grappling with overcrowded classrooms, weak digital infrastructure and uneven teacher training.

The descriptive results painted a nuanced picture. Instructors showed a moderate but genuine awareness of sustainability: the highest-scoring knowledge item concerned familiarity with sustainable development itself, at a mean of 4.095 on the five-point scale, and instructors also rated highly their sense of their own role in promoting ESD. But familiarity with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals lagged well behind, scoring a mean of just 3.229 with the widest spread of responses. In other words, the instructors knew the broad concept but not the detailed global framework, a pattern the authors attribute to limited formal ESD training in the region and to the way media coverage emphasises general sustainability over specific goals.

Values were the standout dimension. The overall values mean of 4.08 indicated strongly favourable attitudes, with the highest scores going to the belief that university students’ awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals should be raised, at a mean of 4.257, and that sustainability topics belong in language courses, at 4.190. Even the lowest-scoring values item, personal concern about sustainability issues, still indicated a high level of concern. Notably, instructors expressed more favourable professional values than personal ones, suggesting that their commitment to ESD is anchored in their identity as educators rather than in private environmental conviction alone.

Classroom practices scored moderately high overall, at a mean of 3.897, but the pattern of individual items revealed where the translation from belief to action stalls. Instructors were most likely to weave sustainability topics into course materials and to give related discussions and activities sufficient class time. The weakest practice, though still moderate, was incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals into language assignments, which the authors link directly to instructors’ limited grasp of the goals themselves. The result echoes earlier international research warning that ESD integration can become superficial, confined to occasional topics rather than reshaping assessment and pedagogy.

The statistical heart of the study is a multiple linear regression showing that knowledge and values together significantly predicted classroom practices, explaining roughly 31.7 percent of the variance. Both predictors were statistically significant, but values carried the heavier weight, with a coefficient of 0.443 compared with 0.270 for knowledge. Read through the lens of transformative learning theory, this suggests that instructors in the Kurdistan Region are in a preliminary but genuine stage of transformation: they have begun to reassess their assumptions, acquired sustainability knowledge and developed strong professional values, yet the process has not fully reached their day-to-day teaching. Transformation, the authors conclude, is gradual rather than linear, and it requires both individual reflection and external support.

The practical implications are pointed. The authors argue that current teacher education in the region does not sufficiently support ESD integration, and that sustainability should be built systematically into curriculum design, assessment methods and teaching activities rather than mentioned occasionally. They call for instructors to be supported in creating sustainability-focused projects that let students tackle real-world challenges through problem-solving and critical thinking, and they urge policymakers, curriculum developers and teacher trainers to treat values cultivation, not just knowledge delivery, as the primary lever for change. The study also flags its own limitations, including the convenience sample, self-reported data vulnerable to social desirability, and a cross-sectional design that cannot establish causality. Still, as one of the first empirical portraits of how language teachers in this under-researched region navigate sustainability, it delivers a message with global resonance: if you want teachers to change what they do, start by changing what they care about.

Subject of Research: English language instructors' awareness, values and classroom practices regarding Education for Sustainable Development in higher education in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Article Title: English language instructors’ awareness, values and classroom practices towards Education for Sustainable Development in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Article References: Adnan, S., Bajalan, D. J., Ali, B. S., & AL-Zangana, A. K. (2026). English language instructors’ awareness, values and classroom practices towards Education for Sustainable Development in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 960. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02161-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02161-x

Keywords: Education for Sustainable Development, English language teaching, higher education, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Sustainable Development Goals, teacher values, KVP model, transformative learning, teacher training, language education, classroom practices, survey research