THE FEASIBILITY OF INTEGRATING INSIGHTS FROM CHARACTER EDUCATION AND SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION – A DELPHI STUDY

ABSTRACT

Although fostering values is promoted within sustainability education (SE), many educators appear concerned or conflicted about how, or whether, to approach values education. An interdisciplinary research project sought to draw on insights from character education (CE) in order to explore the problem. Using the Delphi technique, 12 CE and SE experts were gathered, via email, to explore their perceptions regarding the feasibility of integrating theoretical/practical insights from the CE and SE fields. Experts rated their agreement and made comments on 41 statements. Fourteen statements reached ‘consensus’. Thematic analysis revealed experts’ agreement on an ethical base of SE providing practical application of CE; a perceived tension between democracy, pluralism and normativity; reservations about the individual nature of CE; the need for CE, and SE, to more actively foster awareness of self as part of nature; a desire for holistic and interdisciplinary education; concern regarding exam-driven education and agreement on the need to re-examine the purpose of education. The findings reveal common ground between the two fields, as well as indicating where differences could be bridged and misunderstandings addressed, suggesting avenues for future collaboration and potential integration – possibilities that it would be fruitful to pursue through further interdisciplinary research.

Keywords:

• sustainability education
• character education
• Delphi study
• values education
• interdisciplinary studies

6. Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to the expert participants of this Delphi, who donated their time and minds to the challenge of interdisciplinarity and contributing to a more comprehensive understanding.

9. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The different statements and comments were diverse and broad in focus; therefore, themes represent reoccurring topics and key discussion points in the Delphi, rather than attempting to summarise or provide a complete view of the whole data set. The statements that achieved consensus in Table 1 provide a more detailed view of the data.

2 This theme also relates to one of the agreed upon barriers to SE-CE integration: a narrow view of SE as only environmental science (Statement B5). Orr (2004, p. 60) argued sustainability issues are ‘fundamentality about morality’ and questioned the effectiveness of a solely technical-scientific approach to [sustainability] education.

3 Throughout the paper, experts have been given pseudonyms in order to preserve anonymity.

4 As mention in the introduction, in terms of sustainability, Kopnina and Cherniak (2016) argue that ‘democratic’ or ‘pluralistic’ approaches, which side-step advocating for the environment, are in fact undemocratic in regards to the environment – by denying ‘more-than-humans’ a voice and thus practicing an anthropocentric form of democracy. They propose ‘inclusive pluralism’ (p. 829), which includes eco-representation and calls for ecological justice for all entities. Elsewhere, Kopnina (2014) proposes education for deep ecology, which would foster a frame of mind that includes non-humans in democratic thought and in one’s sense of justice.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Icelandic Centre for Research [141,878-051].