Dr Jutta Nikel graduated from the University of Bath this month after  
successfully defending her doctoral thesis, "Ascribing  
Responsibility: a study of student teachers’ understanding(s) of  
education, sustainable development, and ESD" in June. The abstract  
and contact details follow.

Abstract:
Sustainable Development (SD) and Education for Sustainable  
Development (ESD) have become increasingly influential concepts in  
policy and (educational) policy making at all levels. Furthermore,  
their influence is only expected to rise over the coming years, as  
concerns about rapid climate change, for example, continue to grow,  
and the United Nation’s (UN) implements a ‘Decade of ESD’ (2005-14).  
Moreover, teachers and teacher education have been widely identified  
as playing a key role in making progress towards SD, not least by  
UNESCO, through the development and delivery of ESD.

However, such concepts, and associated events, remain contested. As a  
result, the existence of a variety of different but closely related  
terms regarding sustainable development and education in relation to  
sustainability may be viewed: (a) positively as a stimulus for  
diversity, vibrancy and innovation, whilst also (b) critically as  
signs of the ideas becoming purely functional policy tools.

To date, there have been only a few studies about how teachers  
understand the notion of sustainable development and even fewer on  
how they perceive and interpret their roles and professional tasks  
within ESD. With this in mind, this study investigates student  
teachers’ views and understandings of the purposes of education,  
their notions of sustainable development, and their preferred  
approaches to sustainable development issues with learners.

Given the circumstances outlined above, the work documented herein is  
intended to be timely as it seeks to enrich the theoretical debate  
from a sound empirical foundation through an investigation of  
conceptions/understanding(s) of final year student teachers (as  
future practitioners stepping into the ESD decade). The study is  
explorative and interpretive, and employs a mixed methods design via  
a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews including a  
narrative task, with student teachers from three Northern European  
countries, Denmark, England and Germany.

Emerging from the analytical process, there was a distinct shift in  
the priority given to the different emphases in the research foci.  
This principally represented a shift from an interest in the  
individual in a cultural / national setting, towards a more  
meaningful emphasis on that of the individual in relation to shared  
discursive contexts and overarching thematic patterns, namely, how  
notions like duty, choice, role, values, well-being, contributions,  
and rights, are invoked by the research participants and play out  
more strongly in the ways in which the researcher could account for  
student teachers’ sense making of education, sustainable development  
and ESD.

The thesis presents its findings in three different forms of display;  
as Interview Case Summaries to engender understanding through  
‘understanding the thinking and arguing of an individual’; as a  
series of themes accompanied by examples, extracts and vignettes from  
across the various student teacher groups; and finally, as an  
explorative framework that focuses on the process of personal  
decision-making for ascribing responsibility to oneself and others.

The main research findings document similarities and differences in  
the views and understanding(s) of these student teachers about SD,  
the purpose(s) of education and, in relation to these contexts, their  
perceptions of ESD, in particular in terms of how or whether they  
share that conceptions of ESD being about “generating a sense of  
responsibility”. More precisely, it is argued that conceptions of ESD  
can be described and distinguished in terms of at least four  
different rationalities on the process of personal decision-making  
for having / taking / accepting responsibility. These are termed:  
Type A (‘Internalist’); Type B (‘Reflective’); Type C (‘Regulative’);  
and Type D (‘Realist’).

These rationalities are located within a framework defined by two key  
dimensions: the nature of the decision-making process along a  
continuum that emphasises either principled or pragmatic forms of  
reasoning, and the location of agency along a continuum that  
emphasises either the ‘personal’ or ‘social/institutional’ as the  
agents and locus of the decision-making.

The substantive and methodological contribution of the project to  
research on teacher thinking and environmental education research,  
and in relation to teachers’ professional development and policy-  
making, rests primarily in the development of the explorative  
framework to interrogate substantive and theoretical themes and ideas  
emerging from the cases. In the latter stages of the thesis, the  
framework is also interpreted from a poststructuralist perspective  
and used as a critical, as well as explorative, generative ‘tool’ or  
‘device’ for inquiring into multiple rationalities, the foundations  
and grounding of teacher thinking itself, and the role of decision- 
making in education in the context of ESD documents, discourses and  
practices.


For further information, please contact:

Dr Jutta Nikel
Centre for Research in Education and the Environment (CREE)
Department of Education
University of Bath
Bath, BA2 7AY
United Kingdom

Tel:     0044 (0)1225 385622
Email:     [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.bath.ac.uk/cree