Greek teachers shift toward ecocentric environmental education through wild pedagogical teacher trainingThis Greek study reported on the results of an informal teacher training program that advanced a more eco-centric environmental education. The program emphasized principles of wild pedagogies—especially the notion of nature as co-teacher—to replace dominant educational paradigms with more holistic pedagogies and ecocentric ethics. For example, wilding pedagogy utilized the arts, sensory awakening techniques and games, myth, outdoor immersion experiences, ritual, and guided visualization and meditation to help teachers cultivate more ecocentric ways of knowing and being. The study investigated the implementation of wild pedagogical teacher training to understand the extent to which the program enhanced teachers’ ecocentric values, clarified understandings of environmental education as values education, and empowered teachers to become change agents. The overarching goal was to disrupt dominant educational paradigms and contribute to a sociocultural shift towards more ethical ways of knowing and being centered on the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human world.
To study their informal teacher training, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 Greek teachers who participated in at least 8 outdoor meetings over the course of a year. Teachers completed interviews before and after the voluntary program, answering open-ended questions regarding ecocentric values and notions, environmental education, and locus of control. The post-interview also invited feedback on the program’s processes of facilitation and reflection. Using inductive analysis, the researchers then coded interview replies to investigate the extent to which teachers changed and reformulated their beliefs, attitudes, and understandings.
The interviews provided evidence that teachers’ understandings shifted significantly across one year of occasional weekend meetings centered on wilding pedagogies and immersive outdoor experiences. The most prominent pattern was teachers expressing a sense of wonder about biodiversity, including a shift from seeing humans and nature as separate to seeing a web of connections between humans and natural ecosystems. Responses towards environmental education varied widely. However, post-interviews acknowledged notions of Earth-as-teacher and shifts from perceptions of self to Self—that is, perceiving oneself as part of a larger whole. Included in both themes above was some perception of Earth as an animate being, not simply a planet. Following the program, participants also identified more of an internal locus of control. Whereas pre-program interviews focused on people in power, such as governments, needing to change things, post-program interviews focused on teachers’ own actions and the power of activist groups to change consumption patterns and heal the way people relate to each other and to nature.
Based on these findings, the authors are optimistic about the potential of more holistic and wilding pedagogies in teacher education. The program was not prescriptive—wilding pedagogy through subjective experiences and nature encounters and providing teachers space to explore their underlying values through post-activity reflections led to ethical shifts, emotional connections to nature, and less anthropocentric understandings. Teachers’ changing notions of nature, Earth, and environmental education were accompanied by positive emotions and affect and more expansive notions of Self as embedded in a relational web with others and with nature. Plus, teachers came to see themselves as change agents who could address the causes—not the symptoms—of major environmental shifts. The authors hope that environmental educators and teacher educators will adopt and enrich the wild pedagogies practiced in this program to cultivate pre-service and in-service teachers who can address environmental crises rooted in the Western humanist view of people as separate from, and superior to, nature.
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