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
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