Education for Sustainable Development: Teaching deliberation and ethical decision-making in university coach education

Despite increased recognition that a higher education sports coaching qualification plays an important role in shaping coaches’ ethical decision-making, few scholars have considered what ethics to teach and how best to deliver such curriculum. Examples of actual ethics courses (module; paper; unit) are particularly amiss. This article furthers scholarship on ethics education and curriculum by introducing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), a pedagogical perspective and approach that is employed to teach quality of mind competences necessary to make ethical (i.e., sustainable) decisions. To demonstrate how ESD can be translated into ethics curriculum, we present the university course ‘IIG206 Sustainable Sports Coaching’, which the authors developed and delivered to the students of a CE program, and outline how the course offered students opportunities to practice ‘thinking on their feet’ (or at the edge), complexity thinking, interdisciplinarity, creativity, and ‘thinking outside the box’ - quality of mind competences that have been identified as essential for deliberation and ethical decision-making in coaching. Practical recommendations, which aim to support scholars keen to create and deliver ethics education in CE, conclude the article.