Future Teachers Consider Their Role in Promoting Sustainability: A Curriculum and Research Project

• In Event: Teachers' Stories in Environmental Education: Tales of Embedded Constraints and Activist Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper reports on one dimension of a three-year project that considers the possibilities and limitations of using Teacher Education to advance the goals of educating for a sustainable future in K-12 schools: i.e., what are pre-service teachers' perceptions of the teacher role, following completion of a yearlong interdisciplinary, integrative, sustainability-centered capstone course, compulsory for all students in the final year of a four or five year concurrent teacher education program? Findings reveal the perceived barriers to sustainability-focused practice, including fears that engaging in such teaching would be disruptive and challenge colleagues. Means to address such perceptions through Teacher Education curriculum have been central to the progressive redesign of the aforementioned capstone course, and are also reported in this paper.

Authors

• Avril Aitken, Bishop's University

• Linda Radford, University of Ottawa