Teachers may have substantial power to influence their students' environmental attitudes through two teaching strategies: directly promoting sustainable development (SD), or simply encouraging critical reflection on the complexity of sustainability issues. In the literature, these two teaching strategies are referred to as the normative approach (promoting sustainable development and its associated values) and the pluralistic approach (facilitating critical thinking about complex sustainability problems without intentionally influencing attitudes).
Although educators are divided on which of these strategies is more ethically appropriate, they generally agree that directly promoting SD is likely to lead to more positive environmental outcomes in the future by building support among citizens for SD action and legislation. The author of this article hypothesized that teacher education programs can influence pre-service teachers' choice of strategy, and conducted a survey of pre-service teachers at two Swedish universities to measure teaching strategy preferences.
The Swedish government officially requires higher education programs to promote SD. However, researchers are largely uncertain whether and why graduates of these programs plan to implement pluralistic or normative teaching styles in their own primary school classrooms.
To investigate the extent to which teachers preferred one style over another, the author surveyed 323 pre-service teachers. The participants were enrolled in a SD course taught using the pluralistic approach at a Swedish university. The author also surveyed a control group of 97 pre-service teachers enrolled in a communication course at another university, unrelated to SD. Other than the SD course, the teacher education programs at these universities were highly similar.
The author distributed a questionnaire asking pre-service teachers to rate their level of agreement with four statements about how teachers should address SD in the classroom. The statements ranged from normative to pluralistic in nature. The questionnaire also asked about respondents' level of interest in the environment, and their sense of moral obligation to protect the environment. Pre-service teachers completed the survey once before taking the course, and again after the course was over.
After completing the SD course, the experimental group reported significantly more agreement with statements promoting pluralistic teaching, including neutrality and avoidance of direct influence on students' attitudes. Interestingly, the same trend appeared among pre-service teachers who did not take the SD course, although not to as great a degree. Participants' initial interest in environmental issues was not correlated with their shift in opinion on SD teaching strategies. However, participants' initial sense of moral obligation to protect the environment was negatively correlated with a shift in opinion on SD teaching strategy. This finding indicates that the pluralistic SD course was less likely to change the opinions of teachers who felt more morally obligated to the environment.
As the author points out, this survey only evaluated changes in pre-service teachers' opinions in the short term. More research would be needed to draw conclusions about how teacher education programs influence teachers in the long term. Importantly, the author compared the experimental group with a control group that took a non-SD course, and did not include a comparison group of participants enrolled in a course that taught SD using a normative approach. This means that the author cannot isolate the effects of the pluralistic style of teaching, and can only speculate as to how a non-pluralistic SD course would influence pre-service teachers.
The results of this study suggest that teacher education programs can influence the way teachers address SD in the classroom. For this reason, teacher education programs should select teaching strategies that are consistent with their vision of how teachers should address SD. Although more research is needed, this study concludes that pluralistic teaching methods do not encourage pre-service teachers to promote SD in the classroom. The author calls for more research on the long-term effects of teacher education in SD.
The Bottom Line
When teaching sustainable development, teachers can choose to directly influence their students' attitudes on sustainable development (normative approach), or to encourage critical thinking without asserting value judgements (pluralistic approach). This study examined whether a pluralistic teacher education program affected which strategy pre-service teachers preferred. The results suggest that participant pre-service teachers were significantly more likely to want to avoid influencing students' attitudes. However, participants who expressed existing moral obligations regarding the environment were not as affected by the pluralistic teaching approach. Though more research is needed, these results suggest that teacher education programs may be able to better meet their objectives by adopting educational strategies that are aligned with the strategies they want teachers to adopt in the classroom.