Beyond the recognition of its school and social importance, environmental and sustainable development education greatly challenges teachers. However, not much research has been conducted concerning these issues among elementary school teacher interns who have passed the entrance contests to the profession. This study uses a corpus consisting of more than 398 000 words originating in the Master’s essays of students from eleven French regional educational divisions (académies) who have shown an interest in the teaching of environmental and sustainable development issues. A lexicometric analysis shows six groups of meaning representing the dominant ideas and themes in the corpus. The study shows that the word pupil is central to all these papers, as well as the focus on developing ecological habits and on institutional recommendations rather than critical thinking, which seems largely absent. This study can thus provide recommendations in order to train elementary school teachers in accordance with the directive ordering the generalisation of education in sustainable development – EDD (MENJ, 2019).