How pre-service teachers navigate trade-offs of food systems across time scales: a lens for exploring understandings of sustainability

Abstract

In response to the increasing recognition of the need for sustainable food systems, research on students’ and educators’ knowledge of food systems and sustainability more broadly has grown but has generally focused on what people ‘fail’ to understand. Moving away from this deficit approach, the present study used semi-structured interviews to explore how 12 pre-service teachers (PSTs) in the US consider sustainability in terms of the trade-offs – or concurrent costs and benefits – associated with using different agricultural resources over short, medium, and long terms. Drawing upon the constructs of framing, metacognition, and complex causality, the study found that the majority of PSTs referred to indirect experiences of seeing or hearing about agricultural resources to demonstrate stable knowledge of short-term trade-offs and construct tentative knowledge about medium-term trade-offs. Few described long-term trade-offs. Most participants also acknowledged some gaps in their knowledge in discussing trade-offs across the different time scales. Findings suggest the importance of leveraging and building upon educators’ (and ultimately students’) prior experiences to build their understanding of complex trade-offs that underlie food systems. The study also illustrates the value of using the concept of trade-offs across time scales to explore people’s conceptions and understandings of sustainability.

Keywords:

• food systems
• sustainability
• pre-service teachers
• trade-offs
• time scales
• semi-structured interviews

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the 12 pre-service teachers who participated in this research. We are grateful to Mason Oliver for his help with interview coding; Fred Bliss, Alexander Hess, and Damian Parr for their feedback on our concept maps; Lee Martin, Colin Dixon, members of the EDU 294 class, and the Environmental Education lab members for their thoughtful comments on this study; Jon Sorensen, for his help with interview logistics; and to the reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lina Yamashita is a PhD candidate in science and agricultural education at the School of Education, University of California, Davis. Her research explores the pedagogical design of programs that aim to foster critical literacy using everyday goods, such as food. She is especially interested in the development of critical literacy among learners and the kinds of learning contexts and opportunities that facilitate or hinder this development.

Kathryn Hayes, PhD, is the lead researcher for capacity, leadership and sustainability for the Integrated Middle School Science Partnership at California State University, East Bay. Her research focuses on how distributed leadership, organizational capacity and accountability policies mediate science education reform at urban schools.

Cary J. Trexler is an associate professor of Agricultural and Environmental Education at the University of California, Davis. He holds a joint appointment in both the School of Education and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. His area of research and practice for the last 20 plus years has been agri-food system literacy and the integration of this topic into preservice teacher preparation.

Notes

1. Food systems refer to farm-to-fork processes, including agricultural production and transport of food. For the purposes of this study, environmentally sustainable practices refer to the use of resources that minimize negative environmental impact or maximize ecosystem services, and socially just practices, to the ethical treatment of people who work in the food system and earn fair living wages.

2. There are other resources used in food systems that could have been considered, such as renewable energy or people who process, sell, prepare, or serve food, but for the purposes of this exploratory study, we decided to limit the study to resources used in growing and transporting food because these are fundamental processes that underlie the food that consumers eat.

3. In the US, the majority of elementary pre- and in-service teachers are females (e.g. see Malaby and Ramsey 2011). Therefore, the fact that this study only involved one male is not surprising.

4. The fact that most PSTs in this study had gardening experience may reflect their interest in food, particularly because PSTs self-selected themselves to participate in this study. As a point of comparison, a survey conducted by the National Gardening Association (2009) found that 31% of households in the US grow food in their gardens.

5. Howard and Allen (2010) conducted a survey of consumers across the US and found that 86% buy organic infrequently. This proportion is comparable to the proportion of PSTs in this study who did not buy organic.

6. Rather than using ‘trade-offs’ as a code, we analyzed PSTs’ discussion of trade-offs by separating them into positive and negative effects.

7. The classification of short-, medium-, and long-term impacts is used, for example, in reports about the impacts of climate change (e.g. see Sohngen, Alig, and Solberg 2010).