Problematizing Sustainability Education: Conceptions, Perceptions and Voices from Teachers

• In Event: The Power of Pedagogy for Sustainability Transformation

Proposal

Engaging communities towards sustainable futures involves a comprehensive learning process of how to think and act for a safe and just world for the sake of both nature and humanity. When communities continue to advance in every aspect of life and struggle to accommodate the needs of growing populations, they come across countless sustainability issues that must be addressed in all areas of life including education. As these issues have gone beyond potential future problems and become wicked problems at our doorstep to be handled right away, educators are becoming more responsive to the relationship between sustainability and education.

Given that sustainability is of critical importance to the current educational research and policies, a wide range of concepts concerning sustainability and education have been used in the literature with different meanings, interpretations, and articulations. Although there are various official definitions and root-causes of those overlapping concepts, the relationship of education with sustainability still remains complicated and multifaceted, and perspectives on sustainability education are not fixed. The perspectives rather evolve and develop, and their nature and scope might vary from context to context.

In every society, there are considerable variations in conceptions and perceptions over time and across regional cultures in spite of a shared philosophical base being framed globally on sustainability education. In order to address what they represent and signify, we need to involve in learning through complexity of definition, multiplex challenges, multiple stakeholders, diverse perspectives, and dynamic contexts. Bearing this complexity in mind, this study explores how sustainability education is grasped and articulated by teachers in Türkiye.

To gain an understanding of shared sets of conceptions and perceptions and discover cultural specificities related to sustainability education in a specific community, the study draws on Social Representations Theory (SRT) as a theoretical framework and explores: (a) social representations of sustainability education among a teacher community; and (b) different levels of knowledge, ownership, and accountability in regard to sustainability education. Adopting a socio-dynamic approach to SRT, the study looks into the representations of sustainability education in a relatively homogeneous group to see how it is actualized, objectified, and anchored as a complex issue. With the help of SRT, the study examines how intergroup relationships including psychosocial variables shape diverse points of view that a group of people (teachers) take on the same object.

Designed as a survey, the study included the data from 564 Turkish teachers as two groups of participants: pre-service (n=232) and in-service (n=332) teachers who were contacted via a teacher network and invited to respond to a cross-sectional online questionnaire including open-ended questions and Likert-type items. The questionnaire was sent to 300 pre-service and 400 in-service teachers. The response rates were 77% for pre-service and 83% for in-service teachers. The participants represented seven different fields of teaching as well as a wide geographical area (34 different provinces of Türkiye).

As a result of the data analysis, which is currently being processed through qualitative and quantitative methods such as content analyses and descriptive/inferential statistics (frequencies, percentages, paired-samples, and independent-samples t-tests, Pearson correlation coefficients, and reliability tests), the findings will be organized and reported on the basis of the following questions:
- How do teachers conceive and perceive sustainability education? Are there any differences in their conceptions and perceptions by certain teacher groups?
- What are the perceived levels of knowledge and ownership given to sustainability education by teachers? How do teachers rate the level of their awareness of sustainability education? How do teachers rate the level of their ownership of sustainability education? To what extent they perceive sustainability education as a part of their professional responsibility?
- What are the variables that organize the diverse priorities associated with sustainability education? Are there specific sets of contents associated with sustainability education by pre-service or in-service teachers? Do they take different positioning?
- What current issues would teachers address as a content when integrating sustainability into their teaching?
- What future prospects would teachers set as a target when integrating sustainability into their teaching?
- How do teachers assess educators’ accountability for sustainability education?

Teachers, as pioneers of sustainability, host a remarkable opportunity to educate children and youth who are the future citizens of the global community. With the guidance of teachers, young generations learn how to adopt sustainable habits of living and slow the progression of those wicked problems. As an initial step of questioning what our teachers are doing to prepare our younger generations for the larger social, economic, and environmental problems of sustainability, we first should focus on how they conceive and perceive sustainability education because these conceptions and perceptions clarify how deficient or efficient is the integration of sustainability into everyday practice of teaching. In this respect, it is essential to survey the meaning and positioning that a teacher community takes, negotiates, and associates with sustainability education so that we could observe the emergence of a common language and a shared intention setting among teachers.

Author

• Mustafa Öztürk, Boğaziçi University