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Listening to the voices of teachers in the climate crisis
Conference paper   Open access

Listening to the voices of teachers in the climate crisis

Simone M Blom
AARE Conference , 2023 (Melbourne, Australia, 27/11/2023–30/11/2023)
28/11/2023
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Abstract

Environmental and Sustainability Education Environmental education curriculum and pedagogy
Background: Education is one of the most powerful mechanisms on the planet to address the current environmental crises of climate change and associated natural disaster events. Teachers, therefore, play a critical role in shaping the future of our planet, particularly from a social and ecological viewpoint. However, the voices of teachers have frequently been marginalised in educational research. Previous studies have highlighted that research has conventionally been done to teachers rather than with them. This paper presents the findings from a PhD study that actively and authentically sought to remedy this situation by working with teachers to explore their perceptions of nature and how this informs their pedagogy. Rationale and significance:This contribution seeks to provide insight into environmental education research where teachers voices are acknowledged and privileged as powerful change-agents in the climate crisis. Aims and objectives: This paper presentation explores teachers perceptions of nature. More specifically, this presentation aims to deepen the knowledge and understanding about climate change education through the context of the Black Summer bushfires. Through this contribution, the audience is invited to listen to the too often marginalised voices of teachers’. Methodology: To explore these aims, this research implemented a diffractive ethnographic approach. As ethnography studies peoples and cultures, this research sought to challenge the human focus of traditional ethnography through adopting a posthuman lens. To dwell in the tension that this methodological approach generated, an overarching framework in a transqualitative inquiry was proposed. Transqualitative inquiry is an emergent research methodology that emerged from this PhD study. Transqualitative inquiry extends across qualitative research that is human-centric, to enable posthuman thinking and non-traditional diffractive ethnographic methods to be practised. Drawing on ethnographic methods, the study utilised the posthuman concept of diffraction to situate the research in theory. Impact: The data from this study presents the dire situation that teachers are confronted with in relation to climate change on an increasingly regular basis. Teachers’ voices are privileged in this presentation and their intimate stories of classroom happenings are shared through the posthuman theoretical lens underpinning this research. The findings from this study indicate that teachers require greater ongoing support to meet the challenges of teaching in a climate crisis and this need is more urgent than ever.

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