Teaching in the age of environmental emergencies: a “utopian” exploration of the experiences of teachers committed to environmental education in England

ABSTRACT

This paper explores, grounded on life history interviews, the work of a set of fifteen teachers in England who self-identify as actively engaging with environmental issues and action at different school levels and across a wide range of subjects. One of the core aims of this paper was to construct, based on these teachers’ voices and experiences, a different vision for the future of environmental education in this age of environmental emergencies. Drawing on Levitas’ Utopia as a method framework – which proposes a concrete and systematic approach to creating alternative visions to systems that are deemed inadequate to flourishing –, this study then outlines participant teachers’ practices around teaching in an age of environmental emergencies, including supporting young people’s activisation and projects, cross-disciplinary and complexity-thinking, and pushing for long-term school-wide approaches. It also explores the significant professional and emotional labour that goes into supporting their students’ meaningful engagement with this area within the mainstream education sector, also providing us insight into what teaching in an age of environmental emergencies could look like.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental education
• teachers’ work
• teachers’ agency
• utopian studies

Introduction

Scholarship in environmental education has a longstanding history across the world, both in the Global North (e.g. Dunlop et al., 2022; Glackin & King, 2020; Martin et al., 2013) and in the Global South (e.g. de Carvalho et al., 2018; Ferguson et al., 2021). In recent years, however, we have seen an increase in youth-led calls for more consistent and meaningful engagement with environmental issues as part of their educational trajectories, including around environmental action, as exemplified by the Fridays for Future¹ and Teach the Future UK² movements. In the specific case of England, the context of this study, several educators have added their support to these calls via research (e.g. Dunlop et al., 2021a; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020), working groups and manifestos (e.g. Dunlop et al., 2022), and higher education-funded networks for students and educators (e.g. the Green Apple Scheme at the University of Bristol³; the Climate Education Action Plan at the University of Reading⁴).

Initial responses from government educational bodies across the world to these calls were, however, less promising. England’s Department for Education (DfE), for instance, originally replied to youth-led movements saying that their teachers and schools already had space and freedom within the national curriculum to address environmental issues⁵, despite recent research showing a very different picture (Glackin & King, 2020; Howard-Jones et al., 2021). Interestingly though, there seems to have been an apparent renewed interest by the English government in discussing this landscape of environmental education after the hosting of COP26 by the UK in early 2021 and the UN Climate Change Conference in November 2021, as argued by Dunlop and Rushton (2022), and as exemplified by the newly launched sustainability and climate change strategy for the education and children's services systems in England (DfE, 2022). Nevertheless, in their analysis of this recent English policy paper, Dunlop and Rushton (2022, p. 1098) identified that instead of addressing young people’s original calls for more space and support for environmental action within their educational experiences, with its “emphasis on knowledge not action, feeling rather than being empowered and presentation of actions as choices, the strategy presents cosmetic rather than fundamental change”. Youth-led groups that campaigned for such changes, such as Teach the Future UK, have also responded to this new strategy with concerns, including around provision for schools to engage with environmental issues and action in sustainable whole-school and cross-disciplinary ways.⁶

In this scenario of increased concern around sustainable classroom and whole-school practices within this age of environmental emergencies on the one hand, and of it being “cosmetically” addressed by the English government – through what Dunlop and Rushton (2022) call “placebo policies” – on the other hand, we also find these young people’s teachers. Teachers, as key professionals within massified education systems such as in England, have been historically linked to struggles over the purposes and practices of education. As a result, they have constantly found themselves acting as brokers between their employers, such as England’s DfE, and their students and communities, playing the dual role of following national policies put in place by the state, while also facilitating their own students’ interests and agency (Biesta, 2015; Connell, 2009; Mockler, 2011).

Recent youth-led (Teach the Future, 2021) and higher education-led (Dunlop et al., 2021b; Glackin et al., 2018; Howard-Jones et al., 2021) studies in England have started to explore teachers’ perspectives on their own work around environmental education and action, identifying not only important gaps in teacher education, but also teachers’ growing interest in further engaging more meaningfully with these issues. This article then aims to contribute to this growing scholarship on educational practitioners’ voices around environmental issues by exploring the lives and practices of fifteen teachers in England who self-identify as actively working with environmental issues and action at different school levels and across a wide range of subjects: what can we learn from these practitioners not only about the obstacles, but also about the strategies and possibilities for practice that emerge from their own ongoing work on environmental education and action? And what are their visions for the future of teachers’ work within a global scenario of environmental emergencies?

Environmental education and teachers’ work: an uneasy landscape?

The field of environmental education has taken many paths throughout its history, emerging from different movements across the world and being shaped by diverse stakeholders, and socio-historical, political and educational contexts. In Latin America, for example, it has been historically tied to land and ecological justice movements (e.g. Ferguson et al., 2021; the Landless Workers Movement, in Brazil⁷), whereas in Global North countries like England it has been closely connected with outdoor education, sustainable development goals (SDGs), etc. (Braund & Reiss, 2004; Martin et al., 2013). As a result, understandings of what “environmental education” entails are varied – as also reflected by the use of other terms such as “climate change education”, “education for environmental sustainability”, etc. But beyond the expected diversity in academic scholarship, this field has been also directly shaped by changing socio-political landscapes, as recently explored by other important research teams working, for instance, in England, where the study reported on here is based – such as Dunlop and Rushton (2022), Glackin and King (2020) and Greer et al. (2021).

Glackin and King (2020) argue that different political climates have been very influential in how environmental issues have been addressed within the mainstream English education sector, resulting in a lack of coherent vision among scattered initiatives (e.g. national curricula, teacher education programmes, school inspections frameworks). Dunlop and Rushton (2022), in their important study on the most recent policy documents developed by the English government on this area, add to this by arguing that a constant focus by educational frameworks on scattered “cosmetic” rather than fundamental changes does worse than simply not supporting teachers to engage with this area as part of their practices: what we are in danger of is the encroachment of systematic barriers to both everyday practice and the establishment of medium and long-term vision even for those schools and teachers who actively want to pursue environmental education.

Among these systematic barriers we find, for instance, one of epistemological nature, that is, one concerning the nature and kinds of knowledges environmental education should entail. Researchers, both in England and elsewhere (e.g. Eaton & Day, 2020; Glackin & King, 2020), have recently identified a persisting trend in how the “content” – or “knowledge” – of environmental education has been outlined whenever educational policies and frameworks (e.g. national curriculum and examination boards) engage with this area: a focus on teaching (a) about the environment (i.e. content and skills about the environment), but not on teaching (b) for (i.e. environmental advocacy and action) nor (c) in (i.e. outside traditional classrooms) the environment.

In other words, when found in educational policies and frameworks for teachers in England, for example, environmental issues are addressed through content-based – or knowledge-rich⁸ (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022) – approaches, often involving the sole learning of “the facts” about the environment (e.g. rise in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere; temperature trends; life cycles of certain materials). This leads to an approach to the content of environmental education that is devoid of any engagement with complex socio-political, moral and ethical aspects (Gandolfi, 2022a; Misiaszek, 2020; Tannock, 2020), running in direct opposition to what international scholarship presents about the relevance of interdisciplinary, creative, ethical and socio-political thinking and practice to overcoming challenges posed by these emergencies (e.g. Kahn et al., 2019; Latour, 2020; Schlosberg, 2013). This narrow epistemological approach – including its expected consequences to the content of curricular practices and examinations – then encroaches a very specific (and insufficient) possibility for environmental education: instead of opening up schools’, teachers’ and students’ engagement with the complexities of environmental emergencies, it constrains these educational experiences to solely technical aspects, ignoring the role of institutions, peoples and wider social structures within these emergencies (Glackin & King, 2020; Tannock, 2020).

This epistemological constraining – that is, a knowledge constraining – of environmental education in England can be positioned within a larger global scenario facing mainstream education, especially (but not only) in neoliberal Global North countries, grounded on a specific ontological position – that is, a specific perspective on the existence, nature and purposes of education – which has been framed as “deliverology” (Biesta, 2010; Gewirtz & Cribb, 2020; Mockler, 2011; Wrigley, 2022). According to these authors, an increased focus on large-scale, data-driven metrification of schools’, teachers’ and students’ educational performances – exemplified by large-scale testing, national and international standardisation of teachers’ work, compliance-driven school inspections – has been ontologically shifting education:

• From centred in humanity and, as a result, in interpersonal relationships based on relational teaching, where people (teachers, students and communities) are recognised as social actors;

• To centred in objectification and, as a result, in transactions between homogenous entities based on a transactional kind of teaching within a narrow set of accountabilities defined by external stakeholders, where teachers, students and communities are not recognised as social actors, but as objects.

As a result of this specific ontological configuration of education, important aspects of educational practice linked to relational teaching, such as artistic, ethical, social and political work, have been found too complicated and messy (and often politically undesirable) to be “delivered” and “measured” against these prevalent one-size-fits-all standards favouring transactional teaching (Biesta, 2010; Connell, 2009; Gandolfi & Mills, 2022b; Gewirtz & Cribb, 2020).

Nevertheless, an ontological perspective on the nature of education which is centred in humanity, relational teaching and teachers, students and communities seen as social actors, is what is needed to overcome the epistemological constraints currently found in the framing of environmental education in countries like England. This is because educational practices related to the teaching for and in the environment mentioned above must involve going beyond the teaching of facts about the environment which, as expected, can be easily delivered and measured within a transactional perspective of education. Instead, teaching for and in the environment needs to involve not only the cross-disciplinary work, complex thinking, and outdoor and creativity-based activities mentioned above, but also – and very importantly – people (teachers, students, communities) being actively involved in socio-political, and ethical reflection and action – or praxis – around environmental issues (Dunlop et al., 2022; Gandolfi, 2022a; Glackin & King, 2020).

Therefore, we can expect that the increasing ontological objectification of education will have important effects on environmental education beyond the epistemological level, that is, beyond the presence/absence and kinds of environmental “content” – or knowledge about the environment. In this article I argue that this ontological objectification of education heavily hinders the possibility of teaching for and in the environment because it impacts on the praxis of education, that is, on “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1972, p. 51). In this scenario, schools’, teachers’ and students’ capacity, confidence and freedom to engage with the kind of relational teaching needed to push environmental education practices beyond teaching about the environment and into reflection and action – that is, into in and for the environment – is constrained.

Within this ontological objectification facing mainstream education, including epistemological and praxis constraining, teachers’ work then becomes an important component of our exploration of education in the age of environmental emergencies, not only in relation to the kinds of content they can or cannot teach, but also in how engaging with relational teaching needed for transformative and meaningful environmental educational practices can be an uneasy professional endeavour. According to Gewirtz and Cribb (2020, p. 226), within a type of education centred in relational teaching, teachers are expected to be collectivised social actors defining the nature and ends of their work, directing “their attention towards larger debates about the nature and purposes of education, the contribution of education to social life and the political and economic organisation of education”. On the other hand, in a type of education centred in transactional teaching, teachers are expected to work through compliance towards the organisational success of their institution against a particular political climate, with its externally established standardised performance targets and criteria.

That leaves all teachers and, especially those who are already attempting to engage with environmental education, in a difficult professional scenario: they are expected to comply with encroached barriers posed by ontological objectification, epistemological and praxis constraining of educational practices, while also attempting to develop meaningful environmental education experiences that run in direct opposition to these barriers. As a result, and contrary to what has been recently argued by England’s DfE, teachers find themselves not simplistically having the freedom within the current system to develop their environmental practices, but actually being responsibilised to create for themselves possibilities to go against the grain of said system, as recently argued by Dunlop and Rushton (2022). That is, teachers are positioned by national frameworks as the ones who should individually negotiate a critical type of environmental education against the systematic barriers put in place by those very same national educational structures and policies, including the lack of “budgetary commitment to ensure teachers have time to plan and respond to the demands of climate change for their specific subject” (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022, p. 1098).

Nevertheless, some teachers have been trying to find their own ways to resist this ontological objectification of education in order to remain – or finally become – the social actors they need to be to counter the epistemological and praxis-related challenges currently posed to environmental education frameworks (or lack thereof). And grounded on this notion of resistance, the study reported on in this paper aimed at exploring these resisting teachers’ voices through positioning them as reflexive intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) who can contribute with their own expertise and experiences to re-imagining education for an age of environmental emergencies. Interwoven with this paper is then the recognition that exploring the realities and practices of teachers who have already been working against the grain of the existing – and constraining – landscape around environmental education can contribute to the creation of the robust evidence base that is needed to inform a re-imagination of the current educational system into a new one which indeed has environmental emergencies and climate change “at the heart” (DfE, 2020).

The aim here was then twofold: first, to contribute to the field of teachers’ work by giving voice to those who have been actively working on addressing environmental emergencies and action through education; second, to envision an ontological, epistemological and praxis-related reconfiguration for education based on their own practices and hopes around what an education that nurtures meaningful engagement with environmental issues and action could look like.

Research design

Initially inspired by Biesta et al.’s (2015, p. 626) conceptualisation of teachers’ agency as “not something that people can have – as a property, capacity or competence – but is something that people do”, this small-scale qualitative study employed life history interviews (Germeten, 2013; Goodson & Sykes, 2001) to explore the past, present and future of what the participant in study did/do/want to do in relation to environmental education and, more generally, to the wider landscape of environmental emergencies: i.e. their lives, work, motivations, strategies and visions as teachers concerned with issues of environmental emergencies and action within the English education system. This life history approach acknowledges the highly interactive and complex nature of individual and social lives and of people’s expectations of their lives, work and places in society (Germeten, 2013, p. 614) and, as such, that participants’ views and agentic work on environmental issues were also intrinsically connected with their broader life and professional trajectories (Biesta et al., 2015).

In alignment with this life history approach and with Biesta et al.’s (2015) take on teachers’ agency as grounded in past, present and future experiences and action, this study is also utopian in outlook. As already argued elsewhere (Gandolfi & Mills, 2022b), there has been a longstanding tradition of dialogues established between education and utopian thinking in the Global North (e.g. Halpin, 2003) and South (e.g. Freire, 1972), with it often employed in attempts to (re)think and build new perspectives and approaches to educational practices and/or systems. Utopian thinking has then been used in educational philosophy and practices to help propose alternative visions to existing educational perspectives, practices and systems that have been deemed inadequate to human flourishing (Gandolfi & Mills, 2022b). But, as also argued by Wright (2010), utopian thinking in education should not be seen as an exercise in simply thinking about an “unreachable” goal, but one that aims at proposing real and concrete alternatives that can be built from considering both our existing realities and our goals for a different future. This study is then based on the premise that research undertaken with this of kind utopian thinking in mind can support not only the exploration of existing realities – one of the aims in this study –, but also the active proposal of alternative (ontological, epistemological and praxis-related) visions to the current state of education for environmental emergencies in England – another aim in this study.

Within this landscape of utopian thinking in education, the specific framework of Utopia as Method proposed by Levitas (2013) was chosen to inform the research design of the study reported on here. This framework is grounded on the premise that any research practice that aims at exploring and proposing alternatives to existing social realities – that is, any research work of utopian nature – needs to consider three specific areas of inquiry: archaeology, ontology and architecture. For Levitas (2013, p. 153), utopia as archaeology looks at issues and processes of becoming – of how we arrived at our current social realities – by “piecing together the images of the good society that are embedded in political programmes and social and economic policies”. Meanwhile, utopia as ontology refers to being – how one sees oneself in that current reality – and is grounded on the perspective that “any discussion of the good society must contain, at least implicitly, a claim for a way of being that is posited as better than our current experience” (Levitas, 2013, p. 177). Lastly, utopia as architecture “invit[es] both writer and reader to imagine themselves, as well as the world, otherwise” (Levitas, 2013, pp. 197–198) – a work of (re)imagining and proposing ways of achieving an alternative scenario for a particular research problem.

In the specific case of the study reported on here, Levitas' (2013) framework was employed by organising the types of questions and prompts posed to participants – and their subsequent analysis – around her proposed three areas of inquiry:

• Becoming – How the professional and personal trajectories of teachers committed to environmental education impact upon their critiques of the current education system – utopia as archaeology.

• Being – How these teachers find themselves being – working, living, experiencing – in this current state of environmental emergencies and education – utopia as ontology.

• Re(imagining) – What teachers propose, through their existing practices and hopes, for (re)imagined alternative for environmental education in this age of environmental emergencies – utopia as architecture.

Participants

Fifteen educators with current or past teaching experience in the English mainstream sector took part in this study. Five of them were initially recruited through emails (call for participants) sent to different education and environmental networks' mailing lists in England (some of which I was affiliated to and some of which I was not affiliated to). Afterwards, using snowball sampling, additional participants were invited to take part in this research with the help of those who were first recruited through the original call for participants. Both recruitment strategies were based on inviting those who self-identified and/or were identified by initial participants as “already working actively towards environmental action as part of their education-related jobs”. A consistent effort was made to ensure a degree of diversity in relation to schools, subjects/age groups taught, and time in the profession, as summarised in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants in the study.

Pseudonym	Subject/age-group	Experience in education	Current work (in England)
Anna	Geography Lead (primary)	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State School
Barbara	Science (middle-school)	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State School
Clare	Biology (secondary)	5–10 years in the English formal sector	Private School
Fiona	English Language and Literature (secondary)	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State School
Gabriella	Maths (secondary school)	Less than 5 years in the English formal sector	State School (part-time); Master’s in Education (part-time)
Gary	Learning Mentor (primary) and Governor (secondary)	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State Schools (part-time); Local Environmental Network (part-time)
Greg	Maths (secondary school)	+20 years in the English formal sector	State School
Isabel	English as an Additional Language (EAL)	Less than 5 years in the English formal sector	Online teaching (home schooling, adult education)
Mary	Primary	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State School (part-time); Environmental Network (part-time)
Paul	Geography (secondary)	10–15 years in the English formal sector	State School
Rachel	Geography Lead (primary)	5–10 years in the English formal sector	State School
Sally	Geography (secondary and post-secondary)	Less than 5 years in the English formal sector; more than 10 years in international development educational initiatives	Home schooling and democratic education initiatives
Seth	Biology and Environmental Sciences (secondary)	5–10 years in the English formal sector	International Private School
Simon	English Language and Literature (secondary)	15–20 years in the English formal sector	State School
Tara	Modern Languages (secondary)	5–10 years in the English formal sector	International Private School (part-time); Environmental Network (part-time)

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the open call through networks and snowball sampling strategies used to recruit these participants poses limitations to the research in terms of: 1. Ensuring a certain degree of representativeness of voices, given that snowball sampling will often bring participants to the study who might share similar demographics, professional roles, subject expertise, etc.; 2. Ethical challenges around people feeling obliged to participate due to either being part of a network where I was also present and/or to responding positively to the suggestion of a colleague or friend. Efforts were made to ensure that participants knew this was a voluntary project and that their participation was going to be kept completely anonymous, following the appropriate ethical guidelines (BERA, 2018) and the approval by my research institution.

Data generation

Grounded on the life history approach outlined above, one individual interview lasting around 60–90 min was undertaken with each participant based on a “conversation with a purpose” strategy (Burgess, 1984) and paying special attention – based on Levitas' (2013) utopian framework – to their: own lives, educational and environmental experiences; views of environmental education and action; attempts at increasing their schools’ and classrooms’ engagement in environmental education and action; etc. These interviews were audio-recorded through an online platform, professionally transcribed, and pseudonymised (names and institutions), following appropriate ethical guidelines (BERA, 2018).

Individual interviews were analysed against the three areas of inquiry in Levitas' (2013) Utopia as method framework – i.e. archaeological, ontological and architectural ideas. To aid that process, a short profile for each participant was initially created around their: past experiences of education and environmental issues (becoming – archaeology); current perspectives and work around education and environmental issues (being – ontology); and future-thinking about their work and the role of education in this age of climate emergencies (reimagining – architecture). Afterwards, initial codes were inductively generated for each participant’s profile within these three areas of inquiry. These initial codes were then thematically cross-analysed – i.e. across participants –, looking for patterns and dissonances (Merriam, 2009); resulting themes are presented and discussed as subsections within the three Utopian as Method areas of inquiry below.

Utopia as archaeology: “Becoming” a teacher for environmental education and action

Teachers in this study have gone through different life experiences, from growing up in urban areas or in the countryside, in the Global North or in the Global South, to having plenty to no engagement with nature or environmental issues until recent years. Their trajectories into the teaching profession are also varied: from a lifelong commitment to education to more recent career changes; from sciences to humanities subjects; from primary and secondary to adult education. These trajectories into becoming the educators they are today, with their own critiques of their educational systems and commitment to active involvement with environmental education and action, can then be viewed as simultaneously diverse and similar: they show us different kinds of educators – from different walks of life, subject expertise, educational experiences, etc. – who somehow converge around similar critiques about the historical and current place of environmental issues and action within mainstream education.

Personal experiences and teaching: environmental and non-environmental trajectories and identities

Teachers’ work and professional identities are well-known to be influenced by their life experiences (Biesta et al., 2015; Clandinin et al., 1999), with some studies (e.g. Almeida et al., 2018; Drewes, 2018; Rushton, 2021) having specifically highlighted how the lives of teachers involved with environmental education are often linked to their longstanding experiences of nature and the outdoors, such as growing up in green areas or having family members involved in environmentalism. We can think of this kind of teacher as people who brought their existing deep links with the environment into their professional trajectories, with environmental issues often being their actual motivation for becoming teachers. Thus, as expected, some in this study like Mary (Primary), Clare (Biology, Secondary) and Paul (Geography, Secondary) came into teaching already deeply involved with issues concerning the environment, seeing this profession as a path to share their interests and concerns more widely through their work with young people:

I think that nature, and its connection to environmental ethos, was always embedded in me, so it was just “coming out” as a teacher. It is a part of my teaching identity really. (Mary)

When I was at school, I quite liked the idea of environmentalism, even though it was early days back in the 80s. (…) And then after graduating I worked outdoors and I think the outdoors is quite a powerful area as well. [But] the thing with outdoor education is you don’t see the long-term effects, you get these schools in for a week but then you don’t see them again. Whereas the school I’m at now, it’s just fantastic to think you are part of their journey into that topic. (Paul)

While teachers like Mary, Paul and Clare are usually identified by educational research in this field (e.g. Almeida et al., 2018; Drewes, 2018; Rushton, 2021) as the ones leading environmental education in their schools – which is often attributed to their existing environmental identity prior to becoming teachers –, most teachers in this study have, however, only become involved with environmental issues later in their lives. Most entered the teaching profession with few environmental experiences – or without a specific “environmental identity” (Prévot et al., 2018) –, having instead developed their initial identities as teachers around a more general purpose of supporting young people in their school trajectories. As such, their current work as teachers committed to environmental education has developed while they were already in the profession, emerging from reflections on their purpose as teachers in this age of environmental emergencies: “It was particularly with Extinction Rebellion talking about the climate crisis a few years ago that really prompted me to start thinking carefully. And then I started educating myself a lot more” (Fiona, English, Secondary). These teachers then seem to have gone through an ontological reconfiguration around their views on the purposes of education, with growing attention to environmental emergencies prompting them to become involved in this area from within the profession:

The UN brought to my awareness that it’s the climate emergency rather than it just being “oh it’s climate change it’s happening in the future”. So, when I went back to the classroom just part-time [in 2016], I started linking all of my topics to the UN Sustainability Development goals. It was like an electric shock; it made my teaching so much more relevant. (…) It has meant that I am a very different teacher than I was. (Barbara, Science, Secondary)

The trajectories of most teachers in this study then hint to a potentially important ontological shift happening within the teaching profession in this scenario of growing awareness of environmental emergencies. Teachers are now looking at this global scenario and at their own students’ concerns about environmental emergencies, and re-configuring who they have been and who they want to be as teachers. For most, becoming this kind of teacher – committed to nurturing students’ engagement with environmental issues and actions – thus emerged from re-thinking their purposes and work as already fairly experienced teachers: they are not becoming teachers for first time – i.e. developing some kind of “nascent identity” as early career teachers (Rushton, 2021) –, but becoming a new kind of teacher within their ongoing professional trajectories.

Teachers in this study – from both types of trajectories outlined above – not only displayed a high level of reflexivity around the purposes of their profession on an individual level, but they also illustrate how the ontological reconfiguration needed in the field of education, as argued earlier in this paper, is still possible and has already been happening on the ground. The experiences of most teachers in this study in re-shaping themselves and, consequently, their knowledges and practices, to address pressing environmental emergencies show us a different take on teachers’ work and professionalism in relation to their current objectification by one-size-fits-all national frameworks for the profession.

Their ontological reconfiguration emerges from approaching their own profession as resilient and critical, in which they can transform themselves to be responsive to the challenges their students, local and global communities face outside the school, instead of operating within the epistemological and praxis constraints imposed by transactional teaching trends in mainstream education in England (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2020). Nevertheless, what opportunities have these teachers, especially those with no previous “environmental identity”, been encountering to reconfigure their knowledge and praxis as professionals committed to environmental issues?

Environmental emergencies: the challenges of professional development

All participants in this study, from those who entered the profession in the 1980s to those who have been teaching for less than ten years, remarked how their specific engagement with questions of environmental issues and action was inconsistently promoted across their Initial Teacher Education (ITE).⁹ While this case was less stark for those with Geography and Science backgrounds – where some ITE programmes have been addressing environmental issues as part of their subject specialism foci (e.g. Glackin et al., 2018; Rushton, 2021) – there was a widespread perception even among participants that their knowledge in this field came mainly from their previous degrees (e.g. Biologists, Environmental Scientists) and/or self-study.

And, as expected, the scenario is even more complex among teachers from subjects (e.g. humanities) and school levels (e.g. primary education) not traditionally linked – both within national frameworks and subject specialisms within higher education – to environmental education. Despite arguments emerging both from environmental and social sciences scholarship (e.g. Kahn et al., 2019; Latour, 2020; Schlosberg, 2013) around the relevance of interdisciplinary approaches to long-term and resilient solutions to environmental emergencies, the experiences of the diverse teachers in this study contributes to highlighting how teacher education in England – and the broader scholarship on teacher education for environmental emergencies – still lags with its narrow focus on Geography and Science as the sole place for environmental education, as criticised by Gabriella (Maths, Secondary):

So I would say my paths [as a teacher and environmental activist] have merged and it is something that I am very passionate about but I do feel like I am stuck in the Maths bit, and I don’t feel like I have had access and knowledge [from my ITE] to being able to have that wider learning experience with the students.

In this scenario, teachers from different school cycles and subject specialisms mentioned having to take ownership of their own continuous professional development (CPD) around environmental education to overcome these epistemological constraints posed not only by their original ITE experiences and current curricular frameworks, but also by how the very few CPD training available around this area still tends to focus on Science and Geography teaching. In this study, I then found several teachers in the Primary sector and/or with a background in humanities, languages and social sciences – such as Fiona above, Tara (Modern Languages, Secondary), Mary (Primary), Anna (Primary), Simon (English, Secondary) – actively pursuing interdisciplinary self-learning, especially through self-study, teacher-led networks, and out-of-school training (e.g. environmental NGOs, UN accreditations¹⁰) in order to reconfigure themselves as teachers committed to environmental education and action, despite no academic or personal background on traditional “environmental knowledge” (or knowledge about the environment). And despite these ongoing challenges to becoming teachers involved with environmental education, they all mentioned taking great pleasure in going through this ontological reconfiguration as teachers: “I found it very enriching personally, through reading, through studying through doing the climate change teaching UN accreditation I’ve understood more about my place in the world.” (Simon, English, Secondary).

These are important findings for those of us who work as teacher educators, through ITE and CPD programmes, especially when interpreted in light of the epistemological constraints placed by national frameworks around environmental education as focused on a content-based, or “knowledge-rich”, type of learning about the environment, with no space for the socio-political, creative and ethical learning (Gandolfi, 2022a; Misiaszek, 2020; Tannock, 2020) that emerges from humanities, language and social sciences subjects. What are the spaces and opportunities for all teachers, from different school cycles and subject specialisms, to engage with environmental education as part of their professional development? Why is education around environmental issues still only the purview of Science and Geography specialists?

In addition, as recently argued by Dunlop et al. (2022) and Dunlop and Rushton (2022), these teachers’ pursuit of their own learning through self-study and establishment of teacher-led networks needs also to be seen within the current policy landscape in England that “responsibilises” them for such work of going against the grain and reconfiguring themselves. While, according to Evans (2008), engaging with self-study and the exchanges of teaching resources and ideas can be a sign of a resilient, agentic and reflexive teaching profession, the ontological objectification of education within national frameworks in England still keeps barriers and obstacles in place not only at this epistemological level (which force teachers to pursue self-learning in face of lack of opportunities elsewhere), but also on a praxis level. This burden of responsibility shifted to teachers (Dunlop et al., 2022) while framed by the DfE as giving them the freedom to engage with environmental education as they wish, ignores the structural challenges for these teachers to being, to sustainably remain, committed to this kind of practice.

Utopia as ontology: “Being” a teacher in the age of environmental emergencies

Creating opportunities for critical engagement with environmental emergencies

When reflecting about their practice, all teachers in this study remarked on their central aim of empowering students to develop their own critical and cross-disciplinary thinking around environmental emergencies, including their links to institutions, peoples and wider socio-political structures (Gandolfi, 2022a; Misiaszek, 2020; Tannock, 2020), such as through narratives around local/global connections within environmental issues:

My interview lesson was about how many indigenous, cultures and languages there were in South America and then the connections to all of the destruction of the Amazon and then making the connection between those things. If the Amazon is destroyed and indigenous people disappear what are the consequences? It was a whole activity about getting them to make connections between the human part of it as well as the environment and then what happens with indigenous languages and indigenous people. (Isabel, English as an Additional Language)

Interestingly, even in subjects with less space in the national curriculum in England for critical engagement with socio-political aspects, such as Science (Dunlop et al., 2021b; Gandolfi, 2022a; Tannock, 2020), teachers approached their subjects from a broader epistemological perspective within their teaching practice. Seth (Science, Secondary), for instance, talked about how he had been moving away from focusing on teaching solely about environmental “facts” (e.g. carbon dioxide levels, chemical reactions involved in usage of fossil fuels) to also teaching about links between scientific development and socio-political structures (e.g. fossil fuel policies and funding) – as recently asked for by some in the field of Science Education around the need for a different epistemological take on scientific subjects in the age of environmental emergencies (Dunlop et al., 2021b; Gandolfi, 2022a; Tannock, 2020).

These teachers’ practices, however, went beyond teaching content about the environment to also nurturing their students’ engagement with environmental complexity and action as part of citizenship-focused and youth-led initiatives – i.e. for the environment (Glackin & King, 2018):

We are not telling them what to do, it is their ideas, it is what they want to be doing. So we don’t have many opportunities past maybe Year 1/Year 2, we don’t have many opportunities for child-led stuff anymore. The curriculum is so full that there’s not really a chance anymore for child-led stuff. So I think actually it is really nice that this [environmental projects at the school] is something that they do have a say on. (Rachel, Primary)

In common, all teachers in the study were involved in pushing for more initiatives that promoted their students’ wider engagement with the civil society, moving notions of “action” and “participation” to beyond the classroom/school and, more importantly, beyond “soft” approaches to environmental education (Dunlop et al., 2021b; Glackin et al., 2018; Howard-Jones et al., 2021; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020), such as littering and recycling initiatives. Gary, currently a Learning Mentor and School Governor, described this vision as “bringing people together to facilitate conversations and actions between different groups in the community, like schools, council, community leaders, youth leaders/ambassadors, etc.”

As illustrated by Gary above, these teachers have then been also pushing the agenda of medium and long-term initiatives in their own schools to involve not only standalone student-led projects, but also sustainable work embedded across their schools’ cultures and structures, as recently highlighted by Dunlop et al. (2022) to be an imperative for the future of education in the age of environmental emergencies. And what we can especially see when we look at their existing practices outlined here is that these teachers are not simply suggesting what needs to happen in schools and classrooms for a meaningful future of environmental education in England: they have been already building and living out that alternative ontological configuration of education as part of their present practices. As such, they have much to contribute with the re-imagination of their current educational system into one that is fit-for-purpose in relation to environmental emergencies, certainly going beyond the “cosmetic”, “placebo policies” recently put forward by the English government (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022).

But while most teachers in this study encountered general in-school support to develop certain one-off initiatives (e.g. recycling bins) in alignment with the current DfE’s framing of environmental education in England (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022; Glackin et al., 2018), they found less support when pushing for more cross-disciplinary, sustainable medium and long-term approaches to both their specific subjects and whole-school practices, as further explored in the next section.

Working against the grain and career challenges

I am surprised that it takes the English teacher to step up to do all this cross-disciplinary and student-led environmental stuff myself. There’s not been much support from other colleagues because it involves extra work probably, but I feel I am morally obliged to do it because of the position we are in. So, I get frustrated by the senior leadership team who don’t have the vision. (…) And I am that pain-in-the-ass person who keeps pushing for this long-term work within the school, with senior leaders just being generally supportive but not taking the lead on implementing anything of scale. (Fiona, English, Secondary)

Fiona above is not alone in her frustration and others in this study, especially in state-funded schools, talked about feelings of isolation and challenges to their careers posed by strict curricular policies, assessment and inspections frameworks grounded on transactional teaching. Such realities place them in an ambiguous position of receiving encouragement from their students, colleagues and senior leaders to do this kind of work – as remarked by Fiona above – while also directly working against barriers and obstacles encroached by ontological objectification and epistemological and praxis constraining within national education frameworks in England. As also recently pointed out by Dunlop et al. (2022), this increased encouragement, therefore, does not materialise into more collective work across the school with concrete vision from senior leadership, as also summarised by Barbara (Science, Secondary) below:

You get some schools who have got quite forward-thinking, headteachers trying to go plastic free, you get Eco schools, but it is always like this, about individual choice again and it’s just not enough (…) And the headteachers live in fear of Ofsted.¹¹ It is like they don’t want to be seen to do much different.

In this scenario, teachers with a serious commitment to environmental education not only in theory or in relation to “the future”, but essentially as an inherent and urgent part of their praxis, have been finding themselves in an uneasy professional landscape that seems to go beyond the usual push back against existing obstacles (e.g. Dunlop & Rushton, 2022; Glackin et al., 2018; Howard-Jones et al., 2021) to actually becoming a dangerous professional stance around keeping their jobs and their schools’ reputation safe. This is illustrated by Simon’s (English, Secondary) wish to not be seen as an “activist” to not hinder the “PR exercise” behind running a school, and by Gabriella (Maths, Secondary), who was placed on “official watch” by her former school and did not have her job contract renewed after being convicted for engaging with recent Extinction Rebellion protests:

After I got my conviction, the school said that I couldn’t do the Eco club unsupervised anymore in case I radicalised them. Then I had to have another teacher in with me (…) It feels I have to hide it.

This “radicalisation” mentioned by Gabriella stems directly from the English government’s oppositional stance to anti-capitalist groups like Extinction Rebellion, which have been previously placed in a list of “extremist ideologies” (Busby, 2020), and from current developments around right to protest in England (Alberro, 2021). With teachers in England being bounded by externally developed Teachers’ Standards that dictate they must “not undermin[e] (…) the rule of law” (DfE, 2020), those like Simon and Gabriella find themselves in a challenging socio-political and professional position of trying to support their own students’ activisation, without being able to publicly activise themselves, as summarised by Barbara (Science, Secondary):

I have been on the streets with Extinction Rebellion. I’ve organised die-ins. I have been on TV as an activist and then the Government come along and go “we don’t like this activism, you can’t mention anti-capitalism”. And to me it is just like a red rag to a bull. (…) You can’t know about environmental science without becoming political, it is about capitalism, it is about the government that is in power.

Utopia as architecture: towards a different education for the age of environmental emergencies

Towards the end of our interviews, in the spirit of Utopia as architecture (Levitas, 2013), I asked these teachers to outline their views on an alternative kind of education for this age of environmental emergencies. Understandably, they mentioned several elements that they had already undertaken themselves as part of their practice, reinforcing how these teachers have actually been engaging with the kind of architectural work for social flourishing outlined by Levitas (2013): a kind of work that happens in the present, but as a future-oriented praxis that paves the way to a different type of educational ontology, including for the teaching profession, which actually engages with the challenges posed by environmental emergencies. They offer us not simply unrealised ideas for a hypothetical future, but examples of glimmers of hope emerging from their own concrete educational practices.

“Knowledge” and “action” for environmental emergencies

Among these propositions, they were quick to highlight the importance of knowledge: scientific, from the human and social sciences, artistic, linguistic, etc. But, more importantly, they remarked how a specific epistemological view – one that embraces cross-disciplinarity and social, cultural, political and scientific complexity and systemic thinking (see also Howard-Jones et al., 2021) – is needed, as summarised by Fiona (English, Secondary):

It would mean teaching about the climate and biodiversity emergencies but embedded with sustainable solutions, promoting thinking towards, for instance, circular economy. This, of course, would be done in a cross-curricular way (my own subject for example being able to focus on equity by understanding peoples’ experiences from around the globe) and getting out of the classroom much more.

And within this epistemological perspective embedded in cross-disciplinarity and complexity, teachers also embraced a shift from the notion of knowledge as “individualised” to knowledge as “collective”, in close alignment to recent scholarship around the place of education in environmental justice (e.g. Gandolfi, 2022a; Misiaszek, 2020; Misiaszek & Torres, 2019). In this epistemological approach, we should foster students’ engagement with different knowledge fields, life experiences and socio-environmental realities, and support their own collective action in both the local and the global arenas. This focus on nurturing connectedness – between disciplines and knowledges, between people, between different communities across the world – was mentioned by several teachers also in relation to “connections between human beings and the natural world”, closely linked to one dimension of environmental education remarked by Glackin and King (2020) as often overlooked – education in the environment. Seth (Science, Secondary) further develops this vision below:

I have been quite influenced by some of the stuff on nature connectedness (…) of trying to make it so that my lessons are more reflective of nature connectedness type thing. In order to have that to be a form of activism, to have the soul of the kids switched onto the natural world; whereas before perhaps I was getting their brains engaged but maybe not their hearts. (…) I think I increasingly think that my content contribution is not that important, and actually common-sense tells you that generally people care about things because they have some kind of meaningful connection to it. I almost feel like a lot of our goals in terms of having students make proven environmental behavioural choices could be much better achieved in an Art classroom or an English classroom than they could be in a Science classroom. They will forget a lot of what I will teach them, and it probably won’t motivate them in behavioural choices as much. I do think they need to know the science and that’s part of my job. But it is also very much not enough, so I think it is a thing that has to happen.

Implied by these teachers’ perspectives is then the relevance of knowledge not simply for the sake of it, but with a purpose of empowering and supporting their students in developing their own responses to the challenges of environmental emergencies – i.e. knowledge for praxis. Those responses, however, would not be in the form of individualised, small-scale green-washed actions, such as changing their consumption habits or recycling, but actually through collectivising and getting involved in pushing for systemic changes outside their schools and personal lives.

These teachers’ visions for a fit-for-purpose education in the age of environmental emergencies have then close links to notions of citizenship and social action – and the role of teachers within those – advocated by seminal educational thinkers and practitioners such as Paulo Freire. Here, it is especially interesting to see how their perspectives on, for instance, connectedness, local-global scales, and knowledge for social action can be placed within Freirean ideas around praxis and critical consciousness (Freire, 1972; 2004).

Nevertheless, although these teachers had this clear vision for what education for environmental emergencies needs to look like, they were still very aware of the need for a two-pronged approach to bring about this architectural work: a bottom-up strategy – as outlined above – led by young people, their teachers and schools, and a top-down strategy put forward by English educational policies and frameworks that allows and properly supports this kind of work, going beyond the “placebo policies” (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022), as outlined by Greg (Maths, Secondary) below:

I think it is moving from “Okay it is important” to “Well what are we doing about it in education?” and making that concrete step. So that is what I am hoping for is actually it is starting to be led from higher-up rather than only a bottom-up sort of movement of Youth Climate Strikes and the odd teacher trying to do their bit.

As such, what still remains for us working in education is re-imagining not only these policies (including of teacher education), but also the kinds of political movements and engagement around mainstream education that are needed to bring about these changes and challenge a pervasive ontological configuration of (teacher) education as transactional and dehumanising (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2020; Wrigley, 2022).

Final remarks

As Bruno Latour (2020) puts it, our approach to pressing environmental emergencies needs to embrace a collective reflection about “where we live in, and where we live from”, grounded in critical thinking and socially just transformability around the relationships between different communities and between humans and non-human entities – a “world-earth de-distancing” (Misiaszek, 2021). And, across the world, young people’s recent calls for more meaningful and critical educational experiences around these environmental emergencies have certainly been pushing the debates around environmental education forward towards not only “collective reflection”, as raised by Latour, but also “collective action” beyond their schools’ walls.

Teachers in this England-based study can then be positioned within this pressing contemporary scenario for environmental education, actively undertaking a process of ontological shift from a transactional to a relational understanding of education that explicitly responds to their students’ calls to promote meaningful and critical educational experiences that are fit-for-purpose in this age of environmental emergencies. Their praxis is grounded on supporting their students’ cross-disciplinary and complexity-thinking and their autonomy around environmental issues – through, for instance, youth-led projects and activisation towards socio-political action –, while also pushing for long-term school-wide approaches to environmental learning and action.

Thus, these teachers have already been deeply engaged in developing, as part of their own practice, diverse approaches to educational experiences that are epistemologically and axiologically grounded in critical thinking, collective knowledge and socially just transformability, as recently asked for by some scholars in this field (e.g. Dunlop et al., 2021b; Dunlop et al., 2022; Glackin & King, 2020). As such, their experiences and reflections can give us some insights into a re-imagination of education practices and systems that are – much like these teachers have already been – committed to young people’s, schools’ and their wider communities’ meaningful learning and action in this age of environmental emergencies.

Nevertheless, these teachers also recognised that schools are workplaces as well as places of learning: i.e. that their students’ flourishing towards their place and agency within this age of environmental emergencies is dependent upon scenarios where teachers themselves can flourish in their own knowledge and be agentic in their own practices too. As a result, these teachers’ personal and professional lives as educators committed to this kind of work were an important aspect of this study, highlighting the significant and often lonely professional and emotional labour that goes into being that kind of teacher. In an age of growing prescription and performativity within their profession (Ball, 2003; Biesta, 2010; Wrigley, 2022), which favours transactional teaching as the ontological standpoint of education, these teachers found themselves constantly pushing back against cosmetic and placebo policies that claim they already have enough freedom to undertake this kind work (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022).

And, from this policy scenario that responsibilises them for this work without providing any structural and long-term support (Dunlop & Rushton, 2022), frustration and the fear of being seeing as too “radical” seem to emerge. As a result, it is not ready-made resources and/or Science and Geography-specific CPD opportunities to teach about the environment within the unhelpful epistemological and praxis constraints outlined throughout this article that they need: they need an ontological shift to happen, a re-imagination of the possible nature(s) of education that would support them structurally (e.g. educational policies and frameworks), epistemologically and in terms of praxis (e.g. initial and continuous teacher education, resources, etc.).

But these teachers are not simply waiting for this ontological shift around education and their own profession to be “allowed for them” by national policies and frameworks: instead, they have been trying to reclaim a side of their profession that seems to have been lost in recent neoliberal approaches to education, a side that is concerned with fostering better collective lives for young people and their communities (Connell, 2009). The narratives from the teachers who took part in this study are then not only about their hopes for the future of teaching in this age of environmental emergencies: they are at the forefront of this future-building process through their own current practices, already enacting that future. As such, my hope is that their voices in this paper are not seen as only coming from a self-contained small-scale study in England, but as contributing to a wider conversation among educators and teacher educators about enacting and enabling a teaching profession across the world that is fit-for-purpose in this age of environmental emergencies: a conversation that includes the voices of teachers who have been already building this future as part of their present practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 https://fridaysforfuture.org/

2 https://www.teachthefuture.uk/

3 https://www.bristol.ac.uk/sustainability/doing/sustainability-courses/green-apple-scheme/

4 https://www.reading.ac.uk/planet/climate-education/climate-education-plan

5 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/28/uk-pupils-failed-by-schools-teaching-of-climate-crisis-experts-say

6 https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5f8805cef8a604de754618bb/61a9143ab80963511809970c_20211201%20Teach%20the%20Future%20response%20to%20DfE%20CCS%20Strategy.pdf

7 https://mstbrazil.org/content/future-now-historic-crossroads-environmental-crisis-brazil

8 See more about the English government’s perspective on “knowledge-rich” education here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-importance-of-a-knowledge-rich-curriculum

9 This article uses the abbreviation Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in spite of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) being the preferred term of policy documents and government reform in England, as I believe the term ITE more accurately describes the trajectories and processes involved in the professional preparation of new teachers.

10 https://unccelearn.org/educcate/

11 School inspection body in England.