The article opens up by introducing Environmental Education as a subject. It explains the perceived importance of environmental education and the influence of a teacher’s environmental views on their students’ learning.
This article follows a cohort of sixth grade teachers in Nova Scotia who instruct environmental education. The teachers discuss their views on environmental education and its challenges. They are evaluated through interviews and a thematic analysis test. The sample size was significantly smaller than intended, however the goal of the study was to gain insight to relevant, consistent and transferrable issues that come with teaching environmental education, regardless of study population or grade level. The interviews with teachers were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach.
The analysis made apparent four themes: key challenges to teaching environmental education, how environmental education is integrated into the curriculum, professional and personal environmental education values, and general understanding of environmental education.
Key challenges in teaching environmental education fell into categories of resources, time, outcome, other, knowledge and finances, in the order of perceived relevance. Having insufficient resources was the biggest obstacle for these teachers by far.
As far as integrating environmental education into the curriculum, teachers tended to agree that it should begin as early as kindergarten (which supports a good deal of literature regarding the subject) as well as integrated with other studies such as social science and social science.
The study exemplified that the teachers held high-ranked values of the importance of the environment and educating children properly regarding the world around them.
The study surprisingly found that there was a weak general understanding of environmental education among the teachers. When asked to describe it, the teachers mainly emphasized recycling, which is a very small, over-traditionalized part of environmentalism.
This article poses many relevant questions: Does this point to the idea of specialized teacher trainings on the environment? How can more money be garnered for more environmental education resources? Is it time for education reform regarding environmental curriculum? It is clear that if this study in any way mirrors modern-day teachers, change for environmental education is definitely in order.
Online link to article:
http://0-ejournals.ebsco.com.books.redlands.edu/Direct.asp?AccessToken=7DRTDT3B3ODFMMMNTI5NNRX5XLRLB3L9JN&Show=Object