Citizenship education for environmental sustainability in Lebanon: public school teachers’ understandings and approaches

Abstract

Governments around the world have expressed various degrees of commitment to promoting approaches to environmental sustainability through their national curricular aims. Critical and dialogic pedagogies can support learning for environmental sustainability, but teachers in countries affected by armed conflict struggle to facilitate such pedagogies as they drive students to accurately recite information published in textbooks. In this study, we investigate education practices for environmental sustainability in Lebanon, a conflict-affected area. We conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers across 21 public schools. Findings showed that despite their commitments to caring for the natural environment, pedagogies and policies are, by and large, inadequate to foster a citizenship for environmental sustainability. While teachers reported that learners participate in recycling and replanting activities at school, their self-reports suggest that mainstream pedagogy requires learners to uncritically reproduce knowledge officiated in the national curriculum and carry out activities directed by teachers. Most teachers believed that governmental reform to end corruption was a prerequisite to teaching and learning for a citizenship for environmental sustainability. In public schools, engaging children in environmentally sustainable practices in Lebanon is hampered by a teaching workforce comprising less than a quarter of teachers with written qualifications, a highly centralized governance system and stagnant curricular reform.