Citizenship education for environmental sustainability in Lebanon: public school teachers’ understandings and approaches

Abstract

Governments around the world have expressed various degrees of commitment to promoting approaches to environmental sustainability through their national curricular aims. Critical and dialogic pedagogies can support learning for environmental sustainability, but teachers in countries affected by armed conflict struggle to facilitate such pedagogies as they drive students to accurately recite information published in textbooks. In this study, we investigate education practices for environmental sustainability in Lebanon, a conflict-affected area. We conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers across 21 public schools. Findings showed that despite their commitments to caring for the natural environment, pedagogies and policies are, by and large, inadequate to foster a citizenship for environmental sustainability. While teachers reported that learners participate in recycling and replanting activities at school, their self-reports suggest that mainstream pedagogy requires learners to uncritically reproduce knowledge officiated in the national curriculum and carry out activities directed by teachers. Most teachers believed that governmental reform to end corruption was a prerequisite to teaching and learning for a citizenship for environmental sustainability. In public schools, engaging children in environmentally sustainable practices in Lebanon is hampered by a teaching workforce comprising less than a quarter of teachers with written qualifications, a highly centralized governance system and stagnant curricular reform.

Keywords:

• Environmental sustainability
• citizenship education
• Lebanon
• sustainable learning
• conflict-affected
• public schools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by Nadim Khalaf Foundation and National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon.

Notes on contributors

Maria Ghosn-Chelala

Dr Maria Ghosn-Chelala, EdD is Associate Professor of Education at the Faculty of Humanities (FH) at Notre Dame University – Louaize. She is deeply involved in the faculty’s BA and MA education programmes through lecturing and course design where she emphasizes connecting current, cross-disciplinary research and practice. Maria has pursued interdisciplinary research in citizenship education, sustainable development and technology in education and has led research projects in each of these areas. Her current work is focused on education for global citizenship in which she looks at contextual factors impacting citizenship education and education for environmental sustainability. She has also carried out consultative work for the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Lebanon.

Bassel Akar

Dr Bassel Akar, PhD, FHEA is Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at Notre Dame University – Louaize, Lebanon. His research focuses on learning and teaching for active citizenship in the context of Lebanon and other sites affected by armed conflict. Bassel has a strong interest in approaches to empowering young people through participative research methodologies. In addition to citizenship education, he has led research projects that examined educational programs for Syrian refugee children in Lebanon and Jordan (formal, non-formal, early childhood), explore debates of approaches to history education, and investigate education for sustainable development in public schools. Bassel carried out consultative work with international (e.g., UNICEF, UNESCO, Caritas Austria, Save the Children) and local NGOs in carrying out regional field research and facilitating professional development activities for citizenship and history education teachers.