Though environmental education (EE) has been widely recognized as important, some scholars are concerned that it remains secondary to other disciplines such as science. This leads to less attention to those in the EE field, such as teachers or other personnel who implement EE programming in schools. In Israel, government education agencies have promoted EE-related professional development programs, succeeding in introducing EE into schools across the country. However, most schools have just one designated teacher who is responsible for EE programming usually in addition to their other responsibilities. Research has shown that teachers' professional identities, or their notion of who they are and what kind of teacher they want to be, defines and shapes the meanings teachers attribute to their work and abilities. This study explored EE teachers' professional identities and the meaning or value they attribute to their role as an environmental educator. Further, they asked how teaching EE is perceived by teachers as a tool to gain professional recognition in the workplace.
The study focused on elementary school teachers in Israel, recruiting ten EE teachers from ten different schools to participate. The participants were 28–61-year-old females with 5-35 years of teaching experience in their main disciplines, which included math, literacy, and science. Teaching EE was secondary to these teachers main teaching tasks. To encourage participants to describe their understanding of their working environment and position within it in their own words, researchers conducted loosely structured, conversation-style interviews lasting 60-90 minutes with each teacher. The interviews were transcribed and examined for the participants' perceptions. A comparative analysis was performed to identify shared strategies and thoughts between participants.
Teacher responses indicated a desire to perceived as “good teachers” as society often under values them, and the researchers found this heavily impacted their interviews, even leading them to avoid discussing EE. Participants believed their EE responsibilities were overly demanding as an addition to their standard workload, hindering their professional accomplishments. Participants also revealed that they were not personally committed to making environmentally friendly decisions, despite some participants emphasizing the successes of their EE programming to attribute significance to their EE work. Their applications of community-wide environmentalism, which largely focused on recycling efforts, did not expand beyond the basic information distributed by Israel's Ministry of Education, further indicating a lack of personal commitment to EE. They were quick to distance themselves from the environmentalist stereotype expected from them as EE teachers, and instead they highlighted their other teaching duties during the interviews. Participants also attributed value to EE by associating it with science, which enhances teachers' prestige in their profession, while teachers without science backgrounds had lower self-confidence in their EE abilities. Finally, participants noted that their professional identities felt threatened in collaborations with The Green Network, who are external EE experts appointed as instructors by the Ministries of Education and Environmental Protection. They see this outside guidance from individuals who often have no pedagogical experience as undermining their professionalism, disclosing that it creates a sense of inferiority with other teachers at the school. Because participants did not see EE as contributing to their professional status, there was little incentive for them to embrace their EE work and promote it as a discipline.
There were some limitations to this study. The small sample size and inclusion of only female elementary school teachers limits the applicability of results. Also, the study only included participants from Israel, which may have different educational structures surrounding environmental education, and therefore generalizability to other countries is limited.
The researchers recommend expanding future studies to other schools and countries to get a clear picture of EE and its impact on professional identity across a variety of educational structures and settings. They also note the important role practitioners other than teachers, such as school administration and support staff, can play in facilitating EE in schools, and suggest conducting further research on this topic. Gaining a more complete understanding of teachers' identities, and the impacts of EE on these identities, can help inform more effective EE policies and programs.
The Bottom Line
Teachers' professional identities can impact the meaning they attribute to their work and abilities. This study explored environmental education (EE) teachers' professional identities and how they perceived EE as a tool to gain professional recognition. Ten elementary school EE teachers in Israel were recruited to participate in loosely structured interviews. Researchers found that participants did not see their EE work contributing to their professional identities, noting a lack of personal commitment to EE and stating that their EE work was overly demanding. Participants attributed value to EE by associating it with science, but those without science backgrounds had low self-confidence in their abilities. They also identified collaborations with external EE experts as threatening because it undermined their professionalism. Researchers recommend expanding this work to include other schools and countries to better understand how EE is impacted by teacher identities and inform effective policies and programs.