Environmental Education: How Pre-service Teachers Are Incorporating Environmental Education into Their Practice

Abstract

About the Author: Sarah R. Edwards Moore, Ph. D. is an Assistant Professor of Education at Susquehanna University.  Her areas of research interest include English Language Learners, tutoring, student teaching practices, and classroom practices that support positive student outcomes.

Abstract

Currently, there are several initiatives and programs dedicated to educating students about issues related to the environment and sustainability. Very few studies if any have looked at how novice teachers are instituting environmental education into classrooms.  This article looks at how preservice teachers engaged their students in environmental education activities after attending a workshop that gave them ideas on how to promote sustainability in their classroom.  The pre-service teachers set goals on how they were going to teach students about the environment and then reflected towards the end of their student teaching experience on if they achieved those goals and how.  Finding indicate that pre-service teachers did find minimal time to teach their students about the environment and that the methods they used were not tied to the goals that they set.  Implications of this study will be useful to teacher education programs, teachers in the field, and student teachers.

In the United States, environmental concerns and environmental education programs are becoming more prevalent and their aim is to connect youth to the outdoors and also prepare them for careers in conservation careers (US Department of the Interior, 2010) Therefore, it is not surprising that higher education institutions are creating centers for sustainability or focusing energy on the efforts that their current environmental centers are involved with. Apart from higher education systems, environmental education programs are being increasingly more commonplace in public school systems with the understanding that Environmental Education programs promote critical thinking, problem solving, and high academic engagement (Archie, 2003).With the understanding that environmental education is becoming more important in higher education and in K-12 public schools this study chose to look at how pre-service teachers were translating their sustainability learning, if at all, to students in their student teaching experiences.  Several studies have looked at how students in K-12 spaces think about the environment after they are exposed to an education program or how the environment is connected to people’s views of the world (Bruni & Schultz,2010; Ernst &Thiemer,2011; Wells & Lekies,2011; Ewert, Place & Sibthorp,2005; Cheng and Monroe;2010). Other studies have discussed how teachers need professional development in order to institute environmental education (Shepardson, Harbor, Cooper, & McDonald, 2002; Fleming, 2009).  Few studies, if any, have looked at the impact pre-service teachers are having in teaching environmental education concepts to their students. Considering the growing importance environmental education it was important to conduct a study that looked at how novice educators were incorporating environmental education into their classrooms.

Keywords: environmental education, student teachers, pre-service teachers

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-33-01

Publication date: November 30^th 2019