Can (future) teachers initiate social change?

Faced with constant changes occurring at a local and global level, individuals need to learn to understand the complex world they live in and how to cope with uncertainties, compromises and risks. A potential response to the mentioned is provided by Education for Sustainability (ES). The main objective of ES is educating sustainability citizens (Wals, 2015, Wals and Lenglet, 2016), ecologically and socially aware, active citizens who can cooperate and act as agents of positive change in world. In the context of sustainable development, education is considered a key facilitator of positive change, and (future) teachers the most important change agents in building a sustainable future. Therefore, it is clear that the demands and responsibilities of (future) teachers continue to grow. In order to be able to integrate and successfully facilitate ES, (future) teachers should become sustainability citizens with developed key sustainability competencies, including knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, motivation, and commitment. Earlier research (Vukelić, Rončević, Vinković, 2019. paper in print) revealed that student teachers recognize the need to integrate ES in their future work, and they think teacher training should aid them and empower them for the process of implementation. However, the results also indicate a great discrepancy in the student teachers' perception of expected and obtained contribution of teacher training in the development of their sustainability competencies. Student teachers assessed their education not to have contributed to the development of their sustainability competencies to the expected extent thus not making them feel competent enough to teach sustainable development. In line with that, in this paper we aim to explore some aspects of sustainability citizenship of future teachers as well as their preparedness for implementation of education for sustainability. The study involved 496 student teachers at the University of Rijeka, University of Pula and University of Split and is a part of a larger, mixed-method project “Formal Education in Service of Sustainable Development”, a 5 years long research project funded by Croatian Science Foundation, that began in 2018 and will run until 2023.