"I Had to Take Action Straight Away": Preservice Teachers' Accounts of Pro-Environmental Action

• In Event: 29.078 - A Framework for Sociopolitical Actions on Socioscientific Problems: International Perspectives

Abstract

SE4C is a framework for science education that encourages students to work towards a better world utilising, in part, their understanding of science and technology. In this paper, we consider ‘action’ from a discursive psychological perspective. We describe part of a study with first-year Bachelor of Education elementary teachers at an Australian university (around 400 students). The science course’s topic area of environmental sustainability, its focus on action, and an open inquiry pedagogy involving both primary and secondary research ensures it fits within SE4C. We aimed to empower preservice teachers to position themselves as pro-environmentally active, both in their lives and in their teaching. Here, we report on an ‘Eco Challenge,’ in which student-teachers undertook an evidence-based appraisal of their current sustainability practices. They were then required to redesign and implement practices (actions) to reduce their ecological footprint regarding food and energy consumption and their production of waste, evaluating and explaining their successes or otherwise. The preservice teachers recorded their progress in an open-ended, reflective journal format they kept across the 12-week semester, providing evidence of their adopted practices — perhaps showing reduced consumption, photographs, reports of conversations with significant others, as well as reflections upon their own or others’ attitudes, and information they researched that would elaborate their positions.
Discursive psychology (Harré, 1984) provided the analytic framework for the study. Discursive psychology acknowledges the cultural and relational aspects of any action in the social world and requires an account of the ‘positioning’ of the actor(s). A position is a person’s psychological location in an ongoing ‘conversation’. In discursive psychology, no distinction is made between social and psychological phenomena (as in cognitive psychology). Social psychological phenomena are manifest as social acts. The analysis of social acts involves three mutually interdependent features of a conversation, the actual doings and sayings (‘action’), the ‘positioning’ of actors and the conversational ‘storylines’ (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999).
Our findings indicate that taking action was linked to individual intentionality and responsibility. Here, our research supports claims made by Preston (2011) that young people tend to adopt ecological crises discourses where individual responsibility is uncritically taken as the cause of environmental problems. Our preservice teachers’ pro-environmental engagement was limited to individual action, or ‘small things’ and they differentiated between instinctive and deliberate action. Rather than looking to action as meaningful in context, or how they were positioned in social contexts salient in their everyday lives (e.g. as non-empowered citizens), the preservice teachers became entrapped in a loop of deliberation over the attribution of individual intentionality, induced by their adoption of cognitive psychological constructs like ‘motivation’ and ‘intention’. Our findings suggest that the Eco Challenge elaborated a conservationist/resourcist approach to environmental education (Sauvé, 2005), limiting our students’ critical engagement. The research informs our work in promoting pro-environmental engagement with preservice teachers and suggests that opportunities for preservice teachers to position themselves as members of collectives in relation to current local and global socio-political contexts could be a way forward to broaden their concepts of action.

Authors

• Lyn Catherine Carter, Australian Catholic University

• Jennifer Lynne Martin, The Australian Catholic University