Preservice Environmental Education: Issue of Success Versus Willingness

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-1 - Questioning the Place of Environmental Education in Preservice Education

Abstract

If we accept that achieving an environmentally sustainable future is requisite to the long-term health of Earth’s natural systems and to the ongoing success of human communities, societies, and social systems, then all people should be environmentally literate. In achieving this goal, pre-service programs need to provide developing educators with training to fully incorporate environmental education into their future classrooms. Yet why do fewer than 15 percent of the states in the United States require pre-service teachers to undertake coursework in environmental education, and fewer than 20 percent of higher education institutions in the U.S. require their undergraduates to participate in any environmental education coursework (Desjean-Perotta et al, 2013)?

Almost forty years after the Tbilisi Declaration (UNESCO-UNEP, 1977), few pre-service programs have incorporated even the basic skills needed for teachers to provide their students with an introduction to environmental literacy, which begins with awareness and concludes with student action or participation. There is a need for robust programs of teacher preparation centered on environmental literacy, helping student teachers gain the knowledge and instructional skills needed to guide children in their future classrooms. There have been numerous attempts to build environmental literacy: (1) science and STEM only based programs; (2) joint pedagogy and discipline-based programs; (3) pedagogy-based programs, and all of them have had limited success. Lieberman and Hoody (1998), Lieberman et al. (2000), Lieberman et al. (2005), Glenn (2000), found that when children were engaged in hands-on, minds-on, interdisciplinary experiences in the outdoors, profound and substantive cognitive outcomes were produced, as well as significant affective gains. Practice versus need, success versus unwillingness to accept, and continued practices that have deleterious effects on the physical and emotional growth of students. So why is training to this end not taking place in pre-service programs?

Drawing on the work of Lieberman and Hoody (1998), and Louv(2005), our presentation posits that it is profoundly important to engage student teachers in exploring, experiencing, and teaching using inquiry. We must remediate their approaches to learning about, in, and for our environment if we want them to teach their future students to learn about the environments in which they live. If we want children to use the natural skills they have to explore, that appear to diminish after age four, we must promote the value of inquiry as a critical skill to becoming an environmentally literate and an informed citizen.

We must reintroduce inquiry learning and exploration at the earliest school levels with teachers that have interdisciplinary, hands-on experiences in the environment to build the next generation of environmentally literate citizens. We propose study and practice that is based on the successes in the field and a renewed emphasis in pre-service environmental education in natural and social systems and their interaction. In this our presentation focuses on successful approaches with pre-service teachers to build awareness, knowledge, skills, attitudes and participation in, about, and for our environment.

Authors

• Gerald Lieberman, State Education & Environment Roundtable

• Joe August Baust, Longwood University