Teachers’ and Student Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Nature and the Environment—A Comparative Study Between Sweden and France

ABSTRACT

Throughout the world, the educational system is expected to deal with issues regarding sustainability and to promote pro-environmental behaviours and attitudes. This study investigates attitudes towards nature and the environment among 1,109 teachers and student teachers in Sweden and France, using the 2 factor Model of Environmental Values (2-MEV). The results imply that in both Sweden and France, teachers and student teachers hold a prevailingly ecocentric attitude, as opposed to an anthropocentric attitude, which possibly indicates a predominantly positive approach towards the environment and environmental education. Comparisons between the countries show, however, that the Swedish teachers and student teachers hold a more anthropocentric attitude than the teachers and student teachers in the French sample.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental attitudes
• anthropocentrism
• ecocentrism
• education

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all those who filled in the questionnaire; Mats Hagman and Jan Landström, for their work and cooperation during this project; Catherine MacHale Gunnarsson for the thorough language review of the manuscript; and the Science and Technology Education Group, as well as the ESD-group at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Gothenburg, for valuable discussions regarding early versions of the manuscript. Furthermore we appreciate the comments made by the anonymous reviewers of this paper. In France, two teams collected the data: one in Montpellier (coordinated by D. Favre) and one in Lyon (coordinated by P. Clément). In Sweden the project was coordinated by Niklas Gericke and two teams worked with the data collection, one in Gothenburg and one in Karlstad. We also thank the research teams of the BIOHEAD-Citizen project (coordinated by G. Carvalho, P. Clément and F. Bogner) that have developed the questionnaire used in this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All translations from French by the authors.

2 http://www.artologik.com/se/SurveyAndReport.aspx

3 Maybe environmental protection supervision and regulations in both countries function well, meaning that there are not many industries with smoke that causes harm and if new enterprises were to be established, such as a chicken farm, there might be strict regulations regarding pollution of the environment. These two items (A5, A11) might thus not be totally relevant for the societal contexts in these countries and therefore might not relate only to an anthropocentric or an ecocentric concern.

4 Regarding the item concerning whether it is necessary to clear forests to increase agricultural areas (A23), a difference between the two countries is that in Sweden there is an ongoing debate about whether to let previously agricultural areas be actively afforested and thus develop into monocultural forests. To agree with this statement might therefore not necessarily imply a utilization or anthropocentric attitude for the Swedish sample, but instead possibly show a concern about a biodiverse landscape.

5 With this attitude, one can claim that it does not matter how humans “behave”: Nature is always restored.