Unraveling the holistic nature of ecosystems: biology teachers’ conceptions of methodological choices regarding the study of ecosystems

Abstract

The present study investigates Greek in-service biology teachers’ conceptions of how ecosystems can be studied as holistic units. Data were collected through both questionnaires and individual interviews. Eighty-seven teachers (59.77% female; 40.23% male) working in urban (56.32%) and rural (43.68%) regions of Greece completed a questionnaire instrument, and nine out of the 87 teachers participated in in-depth interviews. Descriptive statistics and loglinear analysis were applied to the collected questionnaire data. The results showed that the majority of participants ignored functionalist background assumptions that lie behind ecosystem studies (89.65%) and argued that when studying ecosystems, ecologists focus on all kinds of species relations including species interactions with their abiotic environment (81.61%). Thus, Greek biology teachers demonstrated a lack of understanding of both why (eco)system ecologists have decided to study trophic relations instead of other ecosystem relations and what these methodological decisions imply for crucial holistic aspects of the ecosystem. Teachers’ understanding of ecosystem holism was shown to be a difficult task and the teaching of how the ecosystem can be methodologically grasped needs to be enriched by epistemological aspects, such as those related to the notion of functionalism.