Environmental responsibility describes having respect for the natural world, being aware of environmental issues, feeling a personal duty to care for the environment, and believing that making a positive change is possible. Developing a collective environmental responsibility may promote environmental citizenship, or active social and political participation in environmental issues. Environmental responsibility has been recently interwoven into school curricula in Finland as part of an effort to promote environmental citizenship among young people. Previous research indicates that how a teacher internalizes, digests, and re-presents the curricula through their subject content has a heavy influence on their students' perspectives regarding what it means to be environmentally responsible. Despite a heavily environmentally-focused curricula, Finnish students have been found to demonstrate low environmental citizenship, defined as their ability to translate content learned in the classroom into sustainable practices, a key principle of environmental responsibility. Finnish teachers play an important role implementing environmental responsibility across the curriculum. This study explored how environmentally-minded Finnish educators perceived environmental responsibility.
This study took place with teachers in two major cities in Finland, Helsinki and Tampere. A total of 13 teachers (1 classroom teacher and 12 subject teachers) participated in this study. The researcher recruited teachers through personal contacts, and selected participants that indicated they were personally committed to the environment, had experience developing EE, as well as experience developing pedagogies. Participants taught a variety of subjects tied to citizenship, such as secular ethics or religion. The author conducted interviews with each participant over the course of six months, and interviews lasted about one hour. The author analyzed the data through progressive read-throughs of the interviews to identify themes.
Overall, the study found that participant teachers believed in the necessity of communal responsibility but demonstrated difficulty in articulating or providing examples, particularly for their students. The teachers generally expressed that the environment should be cared for jointly as a community and cannot successfully be cared for through disjointed individual action. However, when prompted to discuss environmentally responsible activities, teachers identified personal activities such as reducing waste, utilizing transportation alternatives, and recycling. Further, teachers expressed difficulty in generating tangible ideas for how students could act in an environmentally responsible fashion, outside of recycling. The results indicate, that although teachers acknowledge the need for participation of the whole community in order to achieve environmental responsibility, teachers internalize and subsequently convey this message to students through identifying individual acts.
This study was limited in the sense that it focused specifically on the Finnish curriculum, which is deeply interwoven with environmentalism. The results may vary in different geographic locations, where curriculum does not have such a heavy emphasis on the environment. Additionally, due to the small sample size of this study, the results cannot be generalized into beyond this group of teachers.
This study recommends teaching students that environmental issues necessitate community action and the efforts of many. This may be accomplished through championing the idea of environmental citizenship and providing opportunities for students to play an active role in their community. Additionally, the author recommends creating eco-clubs in schools, where students can share ideas for daily environmentally responsible actions. The researchers believe, that by creating group programs focused on environmental responsibility, students will have the opportunity to understand how they can participate in environmentally responsible communal actions.
Environmental responsibility describes having respect for the natural world, being aware of environmental issues, feeling a personal duty to care for the environment, and believing that making a positive change is possible. Developing a collective environmental responsibility may promote environmental citizenship, or active social and political participation in environmental issues. Environmental responsibility has been recently interwoven into school curricula in Finland as part of an effort to promote environmental citizenship among young people. Previous research indicates that how a teacher internalizes, digests, and re-presents the curricula through their subject content has a heavy influence on their students' perspectives regarding what it means to be environmentally responsible. Despite a heavily environmentally-focused curricula, Finnish students have been found to demonstrate low environmental citizenship, defined as their ability to translate content learned in the classroom into sustainable practices, a key principle of environmental responsibility. Finnish teachers play an important role implementing environmental responsibility across the curriculum. This study explored how environmentally-minded Finnish educators perceived environmental responsibility.
This study took place with teachers in two major cities in Finland, Helsinki and Tampere. A total of 13 teachers (1 classroom teacher and 12 subject teachers) participated in this study. The researcher recruited teachers through personal contacts, and selected participants that indicated they were personally committed to the environment, had experience developing EE, as well as experience developing pedagogies. Participants taught a variety of subjects tied to citizenship, such as secular ethics or religion. The author conducted interviews with each participant over the course of six months, and interviews lasted about one hour. The author analyzed the data through progressive read-throughs of the interviews to identify themes.
Overall, the study found that participant teachers believed in the necessity of communal responsibility but demonstrated difficulty in articulating or providing examples, particularly for their students. The teachers generally expressed that the environment should be cared for jointly as a community and cannot successfully be cared for through disjointed individual action. However, when prompted to discuss environmentally responsible activities, teachers identified personal activities such as reducing waste, utilizing transportation alternatives, and recycling. Further, teachers expressed difficulty in generating tangible ideas for how students could act in an environmentally responsible fashion, outside of recycling. The results indicate, that although teachers acknowledge the need for participation of the whole community in order to achieve environmental responsibility, teachers internalize and subsequently convey this message to students through identifying individual acts.
This study was limited in the sense that it focused specifically on the Finnish curriculum, which is deeply interwoven with environmentalism. The results may vary in different geographic locations, where curriculum does not have such a heavy emphasis on the environment. Additionally, due to the small sample size of this study, the results cannot be generalized into beyond this group of teachers.
This study recommends teaching students that environmental issues necessitate community action and the efforts of many. This may be accomplished through championing the idea of environmental citizenship and providing opportunities for students to play an active role in their community. Additionally, the author recommends creating eco-clubs in schools, where students can share ideas for daily environmentally responsible actions. The researchers believe, that by creating group programs focused on environmental responsibility, students will have the opportunity to understand how they can participate in environmentally responsible communal actions.
The Bottom Line
This study investigated how 13 Finnish teachers' perspectives and pedagogy around environmental responsibility, and found that a disconnect existed between how teachers conceptualized environmental responsibility and behaviors they taught their students. Although a teacher may have believed that environmental responsibility included community behaviors (e.g., civic participation) teachers focused instead on individual behaviors (e.g., recycling). The author recommends that teachers should champion active environmental citizenship and pro-environmental values development with their students.