School staff perceptions on education for sustainability and sense of community as reflected in an elementary school culture in Israel

Abstract

Promoting education for sustainability (EfS) within schools requires adopting a whole-school approach for organizational change. In this study, we adopted Schein’s (1985) organizational culture model in school context, which includes three levels: artifacts, espoused values and basic underlying assumptions. Since sense of community is an important component in school culture, we explored the relationships between EfS, school culture and sense of community. Our findings indicated that the elementary-school staff felt committed to EfS and to their school community at all levels of school culture and every level served as a stable platform for the development of the next level. Furthermore, interconnections between artifacts, teachers’ values and underlying assumptions indicated a deep connection between EfS and school culture, which is not common in schools. The study concludes that schools’ investment in their staff’s sense of community is necessary for creating teachers’ commitment to promoting EfS as part of a whole-school approach.

Keywords:

• Organizational culture model
• education for sustainability
• sense of community
• school culture
• whole-school approach

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mrs. D. R. River Schools’ principal and the entire school staff for their help in conducting this study. We would like to thank our participants from River School: the teachers, and the principal Mrs. DafnaRudik, for their cooperation during the research and agreement to be included in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Dafna Gan is co-founder and the director of The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, head of the environmental education Master’s program in the Department of Sciences at Kibbutzim College of Education and the Arts. She is an environmental education researcher and lecturer. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from Northeastern University - USA. Dr. Gan’s research interests include environmental education, education for sustainability, multicultural education, transformative learning, leadership in higher education and non-governmental sustainability organizations. Her academic practices in the education field are devoted to sustainability implementation in both the college sector and in Israel.

Iris Alkaher received her PhD in science education from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Currently, she is a lecturer in the faculty of science at the Kibbutzim College of Education in Israel and teaches in the graduate Master of Education program in environmental education. She is a member of the college’s center of Environmental and Sustainability Education . She also serves as a member in the board of the Israeli Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences and as an editorial board member of the peer-review journal of Ecology & Environment [in Hebrew]. Her research interests include environmental and sustainability education (ESE) in higher education, and sociocultural aspects of science and ESE.