Laying down a path in walking: student teachers’ emerging ecological identities

Abstract

There is growing global awareness of the importance of what are often labelled as ‘natural environments’ for human health, well-being and cognitive development. However, fostering learning in such ‘natural environments’, as they may be differently experienced and understood, requires a review of theoretical and practical approaches in teacher education, foregrounding the sensorial, experiential, embodied and relational dimensions of learning processes. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study on the experiences of a group of first year undergraduate student teachers enroled in a newly introduced course on outdoor learning. Adopting a pragmatic and enactivist mixed methods approach, the study provides evidence of impact of the course on the students. Specifically, the study contributes a qualitative description of student teachers’ learning trajectories, featuring what students deemed to be significant moments of an emerging ecological awareness. Findings point to important implications for curriculum and pedagogy, promoting environmental consciousness in formal teacher education contexts.

Keywords:

• Ecological identity
• enactivism
• nature connectedness
• Outdoor learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three reviewers who provided insightful commentary and useful suggestions for engaging with the complex and contested conceptualisations integrated into this study. Sitting at the intersection of current theoretical and methodological paradigms, their feedback has been extremely useful in taking our own thinking forward. We thank them wholeheartedly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While accepting that humans are a part of nature and, therefore, by implication everything we do as humans must be ‘natural’, a semantic focus on the meaning of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ may lead to potential problems, (i) A situation of complacent acceptance and a ‘do nothing’ attitude, justified by the idea that all we do is ‘natural’. (ii) Diverting of attention away from the fact that activities conducted by a small part of humanity are deliberately and knowingly perpetrating damage on the planet. Even the speed of climate change is far greater than that ever produced by the other volcanic or solar activity that has caused previous climate change (IPCC 2007). Thus, focussing on human/nature does not necessarily imply a dualistic ‘humans outside nature’ position, but rather that the impact of some humans is much greater than has ever been seen in the history of the planet. What we would argue is that new conceptualisations and new language are needed to engage in meaningful discourse around the human-nature nexus, some of which is already in development (e.g. Braidotti 2013; Cohen 2013; Morton 2007).

2 Mind is used in this article in the same non-dualistic sense as Dewey’s ‘body-mind’ (Johnson 2006) but there is also a strong relationship between brain and mind, where a brain is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for mind, as mind extends beyond the brain and, while having biological dimensions, is a primarily social and contextual phenomenon – our cognition is not merely located in the brain in our head. For further discussion of this, please see, for example, Damasio (2011), Johnson (2017) and Noe¨ (2009).

3 Autopoiesis – refers to a system capable of maintaining and reproducing itself – living organisms are autopoietic systems.

4 We are aware that critiques can be raised about the design of the scale which is based on contrasting categories, which may sharpen dichotomical views of human-nature relationships. Such dilemma was addressed earlier in the paper (5). The use of the scale in this paper is justified on the basis of this being one method and thus one way of understanding the students’ learning process, included as part of a dynamic and holistic interpretation of the students’ more extended and expansive learning journey during the course.