Environmental And Sustainability Education In Teacher Education

This book was inspired by the inaugural National Roundtable on Environmental and Sustainability Education in Canadian Faculties of Education (Roundtable 2016), which took place June 14-16, 2016, at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Roundtable 2016 brought together over seventy participants from across Canada, including educators, researchers, policy-makers, consultants, and community organizations. Over the course of three days, participants took part in keynote addresses, research colloquia, networking socials, and collaborative inquiry activities focused on Environmental Sustainability Education in Teacher Education (ESE-TE). Roundtable 2016 resulted in the publication of a National Action Plan containing action-oriented recommendations for enhancing ESE-TE, and a position statement titled “The Otonabee Declaration,” where delegates articulated their views regarding environmental degradation, the critical need for enhancing ESE-TE, and, the role educators, children, youth, educational institutions, policy makers, and Indigenous communities play in enhancing ESE-TE in Canada. This volume concludes with a discussion placing current Canadian ESE-TE theory and practice within an international context.

Empowering Teachers through Environmental and Sustainability Education draws inspiration from an empirical study exploring early career teachers' attempts at enacting Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in their everyday teaching practices. It showcases how a confluence of personal, professional and environmental identities supports implementation of ESE. Additionally, this book discusses key concepts and issues surrounding ESE and the ways in which teachers may claim agency and power to create change in their classroom practices. Drawing from theoretical perspectives, such as Bourdieu's 'thinking tools' habitus and capital, theories of identity, and Foucault's concept of power and knowledge relations, this book explores how teachers negotiate policies, curriculum and institutional norms to further theoretical and practical understanding of ESE. The use of personal narratives offers new insights into teachers' agency in creating localised yet powerful change through small and meaningful actions. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to explore ways in which meaningful change can be made in educational settings through these small agentive and yet empowering steps. This book reveals that teachers can enact agency and navigate the power structures that exist within educational settings in order to make ESE meaningful within their classrooms.

Empowering Teachers through Environmental and Sustainability Education draws inspiration from an empirical study exploring early career teachers’ attempts at enacting Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in their everyday teaching practices. It showcases how a confluence of personal, professional and environmental identities supports implementation of ESE. Additionally, this book discusses key concepts and issues surrounding ESE and the ways in which teachers may claim agency and power to create change in their classroom practices. Drawing from theoretical perspectives, such as Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ habitus and capital, theories of identity, and Foucault’s concept of power and knowledge relations, this book explores how teachers negotiate policies, curriculum and institutional norms to further theoretical and practical understanding of ESE. The use of personal narratives offers new insights into teachers’ agency in creating localised yet powerful change through small and meaningful actions. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to explore ways in which meaningful change can be made in educational settings through these small agentive and yet empowering steps. This book reveals that teachers can enact agency and navigate the power structures that exist within educational settings in order to make ESE meaningful within their classrooms.

This book offers an accessible guide to understanding the importance of a systems approach to embedding sustainability into teacher education practice, providing a practical resource for teacher education academics and others with an interest in organisational change. It draws principally on the findings of a 12-year research project in Australia, working directly with academics and their teacher education institutions to ensure that sustainability and education for sustainability are embedded in teacher education courses. Illustrating the need for change in teacher education in the context of education for sustainability, the book discusses the theory underpinning and practical application of a system-based change model. It also offers examples of how the model has been used in practice and shows education academics how to implement change within their own organizations and use the ideas and tools presented to advance sustainability in their discipline areas.

This document is a curriculum for preservice teachers that attempts to illustrate how environmental education and development education are related and to provide practical assistance for teacher educators who would like to include these important fields in their programs. The project provides a focus for discussion of environmental and development education issues in teacher education in Australia. The particular audience for this project is preservice teacher education. However, the workshop modules are adapted easily for the continuing or inservice professional development of teachers. The workshops provided in this program may be used in three major ways: (1) the materials may be used as the basis for a linked program of professional and curriculum development; (2) the workshop materials may be infused, with or without local adaptations, into a range of courses, subjects, or units in a teacher education course; and (3) the workshops may be used as a set for a core or elective course in development and environmental education. Three workshops were written to be introductory. These workshops provide an introduction to environmental education, an introduction to development education, and a way of seeing the linkages and similarities between environmental and development education. These three workshops may be considered as a hub while the remaining 15 workshops are spokes that address particular themes and specialties in environmental and development education. These other themes discuss futures, science, educational resources, sustainability, population, and waste management among others. (DK)

This edited collection invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on - and craft visions for - the future of environmental and sustainability education. It explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today. Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. 'Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education' builds on this earlier work - as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.

Learner-centered teaching is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the roles of students as participants in and drivers of their own learning. Learner-centered teaching activities go beyond traditional lecturing by helping students construct their own understanding of information, develop skills via hands-on engagement, and encourage personal reflection through metacognitive tasks. In addition, learner-centered classroom approaches may challenge students’ preconceived notions and expand their thinking by confronting them with thought-provoking statements, tasks or scenarios that cause them to pay closer attention and cognitively “see” a topic from new perspectives. Many types of pedagogy fall under the umbrella of learner-centered teaching including laboratory work, group discussions, service and project-based learning, and student-led research, among others. Unfortunately, it is often not possible to use some of these valuable methods in all course situations given constraints of money, space, instructor expertise, class-meeting and instructor preparation time, and the availability of prepared lesson plans and material. Thus, a major challenge for many instructors is how to integrate learner-centered activities widely into their courses. The broad goal of this volume is to help advance environmental education practices that help increase students’ environmental literacy. Having a diverse collection of learner-centered teaching activities is especially useful for helping students develop their environmental literacy because such approaches can help them connect more personally with the material thus increasing the chances for altering the affective and behavioral dimensions of their environmental literacy. This volume differentiates itself from others by providing a unique and diverse collection of classroom activities that can help students develop their knowledge, skills and personal views about many contemporary environmental and sustainability issues. ​ ​ ​