The identity work of environmental education teachers in Israel

Abstract

Despite growing interest in promoting environmental education (EE), as in other countries, its status within the formal education system in Israel is still ambiguous and its effectiveness questionable. Proceeding from the view of structure-agent interdependency, the present study focuses on teachers’ identity as key to understanding the situation in their professional field. Analysis is based on in-depth interviews with ten EE teachers in ten public elementary-schools in Israel, to investigate their occupational self-perception as part of the system in which they operate. Findings reveal an ambivalent professional identity and a weak sense of agency as EE teachers. Teachers’ impaired occupational self-image have implications for their potential role in advancing EE in particular and for the educational field in Israel in general.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• identity work
• teachers
• professional status

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the anonymous readers of the first version of this article for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 While in its broadest sense, EE includes the diverse formal and informal frameworks, for children and for adults, dealing with the relations between humans and the environment (Sauvé 2005), the present discussion is restricted to EE in public schools, leaving aside the debate regarding EE vs. ESD (Mogensen and Schnack 2010).

2 All names as pseudonyms. All translations from the Hebrew are ours.