The emergence and institutional co-determination of sustainability as a teaching topic in interdisciplinary science teacher education

Abstract

This paper takes an institutional perspective on the topic of sustainability in order to analyse how this ‘idea’ enters science teacher education through an interdisciplinary approach. It shows how the development and implementation of a course for Danish pre-service teachers was conditioned and constrained by a complex web of interactions in and among the teaching disciplines of biology, geography and physics/chemistry and among the institutions of school, teacher college and university. The data collected are used to identify influences among the disciplines as well as disciplinary differences, conceptualised through a new reference model that separates the analysis from the usual sustainability dimensions. The findings reveal how sustainability as a teaching topic can be a unifying idea in an interdisciplinary setting. Disciplinary differences evidently impact course planning and implementation significantly, but not exclusively. By elaborating on the interactions between these circumstances, the paper provides insight into the processes of developing interdisciplinary teacher education.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• science education
• didactic transposition
• institutional perspective

Notes

1. ATD includes practice, i.e. the use or application of knowledge in its epistemology of knowledge.

2. The ATD meaning of ecology here refers to the institutional settings in which the knowledge ‘lives’. For this reason words derived from ecology, e.g. ecological sustainability, has been avoided throughout the paper.

3. Hereto came a number of courses on general pedagogic subjects, which were toned slightly to align with the science focus.

4. Attempts at influence in the other direction were seen. Typically educators referring to prior successful teaching of a particular subject they believed could fit well into the new course. But these statements never gained any traction in the discourse. These proposed teaching elements might have been used in the actual teaching nevertheless, the data does not cover this, but again, it did not have any impact on the discourse surrounding the case course.