The issue for this study is how teachers and teacher students understand the concept of sustainable development and work and want to work with sustainable development in their education. The aim is to provide knowledge that can lead to a better implementation of sustainable development in education. The study has a phenomenological perspective and is based on the concept of sustainable development and theories of education for sustainable development. The study consists of interviews with four teachers who act as primary teachers and four teacher students who study on the last semester of their education. The study shows that all respondents think that sustainable development is a concept that is difficult to interpret and that they have a distorted interpretation of the concept. All are focusing on environmental protection and overlook economic and social development. That is particularly apparent in their examples of how sustainable development should be implemented in teaching. The study also shows that the teacher students have a more complete picture of the concept of sustainable development and, unlike the teachers, explicitly states that sustainable development should permeate the entire teaching.