Transformative Environmental Education Study Abroad for Preservice Teachers: Nurturing Critical Environmental Awareness Toward Pedagogical Action

• In Event: Critical Thinking and Cognition in Environmental Education

Abstract

We examine how an Environmental Education (EE) study abroad experience can enhance, in the long term, preservice teachers’ (N=17) environmental awareness, environmental identity development, and the impacts on teachers’ EE pedagogical practices. Our composite theoretical framework of Transformational Learning Theory and Critical Pedagogy of Place draws upon data from purposefully selected descriptive case studies’ (n = 2) surveys, and interviews of teachers six years after travel, to explore the meanings they made of their individual experiences on their twelve-day trip to Peru, part of a course on their EE-focused preservice teacher cohort. In this mixed-methods study we found that providing international opportunities to become more environmentally aware can help prepare pedagogically competent teachers to both take and encourage environmental action.

Authors

• Aerin W Benavides, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Allison Freed, University of the Ozarks

• Lacey Denise Huffling, Georgia Southern University