Making sense of education ‘responsibly’: findings from a study of student teachers' understanding(s) of education, sustainable development and Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

This article discusses findings from a tri‐country study of student teachers' understandings of the purposes of education, their conceptions of sustainable development and the task of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). At its heart are case studies of 30 student teachers from Initial Teacher Education Programmes in England, Denmark and Germany (10 from each country). While they are diverse in their personal, professional and subject disciplinary backgrounds, and they work in a variety of school subject areas, all the students share the objective of becoming members of the teaching profession in the primary or lower secondary schools of their countries, and thus each one currently faces the additional challenge of understanding and responding to national, cross‐cutting policy initiatives on sustainable development and ESD. As interpretative research, the study catalogued and mapped similarities and differences in student teacher understandings, and identified those notions, thoughts and ideas that were meaningful to a beginning teacher's interpretations and sense‐making of key ESD concepts and tasks. The findings highlight the widespread importance of ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘having responsibility’ as key notions in interpreting their professional role and student learning in relation to ESD. An explorative framework developed during the data analysis suggests that in making sense of ESD, student teachers have recourse to one or more of at least four identifiable rationalities for ascribing responsibility to oneself or others, where each rationality articulates a different set of responses to questions about the prioritized locus of agency and the nature of the decision‐making process. The framework offers a critical and generative tool for stimulating debate in the field about policy and professional preparation and development and, in particular, the nature, processes and qualities of learning that are understood to ‘generate a sense of responsibility’, within the broader—and in the case of ESD—related quests of education and sustainable development.

Acknowledgements

This project was made possible by the involvement and commitment of the student teachers. I would also like to thank Alan Reid, William Scott and Elisabeth Barratt‐Hacking for supervising the doctoral study described here and for their comments on this paper. Funding for the study was provided by the University of Bath, Department of Education.

Notes

1. Interviewees in Denmark: Female (n = 8); Male (n = 2); Folkeskole teacher (state 2003) study four subjects; aged between 24–34. Interviewees in England: Female (n = 4); Male (n = 6); Primary school focus (n = 1); Secondary school focus (n = 9): Subjects, Geography (n = 2), Science (n = 3); Modern Foreign Languages (n = 2); Mathematics (n = 1); English (n = 1); aged between 23–39. Interviewees in Germany: Female (n = 6), Male (n = 4); Primary school focus (n = 8); Secondary school focus (n = 2); Subjects, Mathematics & Physics (n = 1); German & Economics (n = 1); aged between 22–44.

2. While a self‐selection process has its limitations, efforts to approach a variety of students and the purposive sampling strategy were deemed successful in terms of the needs of the research design and enabling access to a spread of different levels of understanding of SD and ESD. While it is important to note that the ‘deselected people’ ought to be of equal concern to ESD research and are hard to reach, in this research, active processes of understanding and sense‐making were the priority, and motivational issues (although connected and important to the representativeness of the findings) were regarded as a separate matter at this stage, for further study.

3. Within the process of writing of detailed Interview Case (Participant) Summaries and undertaking Cross Case Analysis (for details see Nikel, 2005; in particular p. 18).

4. E8 refers to the 8th participant (order of interview) from the English cohort; similarly D is used for Danish participants in the study, and G for German participants.

5. For example, guided by Glaser's Constant Comparative Method with its emphasis on creative generation of theory and using the constant comparison of incidents, categories and properties of categories to come to suggest ‘many properties and hypotheses about a general phenomenon’ (Glaser, 1965, p. 438).