Abstract
Many education professionals are looking to Environmental and Sustainability Education as a guide to incorporate curricular lessons and activities into school classrooms and other learning environments. Building upon the framework of Jickling and Wals (2008) of identifying how to teach about environmental education in transformative ways, this study examined how the experiences and perspectives of seven faculty and staff members at a K-12 International Baccalaureate school in Singapore impacted how they taught about sustainability issues. It also investigated how they work to empower students to become change agents by employing concepts and strategies such as hands-on learning, systems thinking, and service learning. Qualitative interview data revealed four overarching key themes: (1) importance of local context (both the school and the broader socio-political context), (2) pedagogy in relation to student psychology, (3) teacher and staff views on effective pedagogy for teaching about climate crises, and (4) mental health, as experienced by both students and their educators. Teachers and their students regularly struggled with tensions of authority (e.g., school/government, parent/child, teacher/student) and outlook (e.g., “doomism”/hope, empowered/disempowered). Nonetheless, they expressed a variety of thoughtful ways to cultivate their students’ lifelong advocacy for the environment and other related social justice issues.
Highlights
Accepted: 24 September 2021With increasing awareness of the gravity of our myriad threats to ecological sustainability, many education professionals worldwide have been devoting more curricular and pedagogical resources to raising students’ environmental awareness and implementing lessons and programs that address these issues through environmental and sustainability education
While multiple themes emerged from the interviews, four overarching themes stood out: (1) context, (2) pedagogy in relation to student psychology, (3) mental health, as experienced by both students and their educators, and (4) teacher and staff views on effective pedagogy for teaching about climate crises
We found that many of our participants’ perspectives and pedagogical priorities were mirrored in a recently published collection of essays written by scholars and environmental advocates writing from a Deep Adaptation framework [17]; interestingly enough, these scholars early on called for the need for “transformative adaptation”, which aligns well to our focus on transformative education
Summary
With increasing awareness of the gravity of our myriad threats to ecological sustainability, many education professionals worldwide have been devoting more curricular and pedagogical resources to raising students’ environmental awareness and implementing lessons and programs that address these issues through environmental and sustainability education. Given their generally ample resources and freedom from national curriculum mandates, international schools can be ideal locales to study how schools envision, experiment, and implement education for environmental sustainability. We were keen to understand what they thought it meant to live “sustainably”, how their teaching was impacted by their local context and foreign identity, the ways in which they were concerned about the climate crisis impacting themselves and their students during their lives, the extent to which they or their students experienced “eco-anxiety” (and how they addressed it), and how their overall optimistic and pessimistic outlooks shaped their pedagogical strategies in teaching about
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
