Storying Journeys in Environmental Sustainability Education: Navigating Teacher Candidates’ ESE Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis seeks to understand the experiences of twenty K-12 teacher candidates (TCs) within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) at a large Ontario faculty of education. Using Sauvé’s (2005) cartography of environmental education currents and Cooper and White’s (2012) five contexts as frameworks, I ask to what extent and in what ways are TCs engaging within ESE during their teacher education programs. Through a qualitative interview study inspired by the art of storytelling, twenty personal, highly-detailed and honest accounts developed of what it is like to be a TC engaging in ESE during an uncertain time (COVID-19) and looking towards an uncertain future for our climate. In their own words, TCs reveal the conceptualizations of ESE they carry, the range of emotions they navigate, the opportunities and supports they receive, the barriers and challenges they face, and the motivations that draw them into this complex field of study (despite their faculty of education not requiring them to do so). In listening to their stories, we hear powerful testimony from a group of TCs urging Canadian faculties of education and K-12 schools to respond to their call for relevant, engaging and meaningful ESE and climate action that is rooted in intersectionality, social justice, and appropriately inclusive of Indigenous pedagogies and perspectives. This study is significant in a number of ways: it informs our understandings of the role of ESE theory, the spectrum of emotions (from eco-anxiety to resilience), the critical importance of community, and the individual and systemic barriers at play in TCs’ personal and professional lives. I conclude the thesis with suggestions and considerations - theoretical and practical - for ESE in Canadian teacher education programs. Keywords: environmental and sustainability education; ESE; environmental education; teacher candidates; teacher education; climate justice; climate action; eco-anxiety; interview study; stories; intersectional environmentalism; environmental justice; ecojustice education; Indigenous education
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".