Ascribing Responsibility:
a study of student teachers’ understanding(s) of education, sustainable development, and ESD

Sustainable Development (SD) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) have become increasingly influential concepts in policy and (educational) policy making at all levels. Furthermore, their influence is only expected to rise over the coming years, as concerns about rapid climate change, for example, continue to grow, and the United Nation’s (UN) implements a ‘Decade of ESD’ (2005-14). Moreover, teachers and teacher education have been widely identified as playing a key role in making progress towards SD, not least by UNESCO, through the development and delivery of ESD.
However, such concepts, and associated events, remain contested. As a result, the existence of a variety of different but closely related terms regarding sustainable development and education in relation to sustainability may be viewed: (a) positively as a stimulus for diversity, vibrancy and innovation, whilst also (b) critically as signs of the ideas becoming purely functional policy tools.
To date, there have been only a few studies about how teachers understand the notion of sustainable development and even fewer on how they perceive and interpret their roles and professional tasks within ESD. With this in mind, this study investigates student teachers’ views and understandings of the purposes of education, their notions of sustainable development, and their preferred approaches to sustainable development issues with learners.

Given the circumstances outlined above, the work documented herein is intended to be timely as it seeks to enrich the theoretical debate from a sound empirical foundation through an investigation of conceptions/understanding(s) of final year student teachers (as future practitioners stepping into the ESD decade). The study is explorative and interpretive, and employs a mixed methods design via a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews including a narrative task, with student teachers from three Northern European countries, Denmark, England and Germany.

Emerging from the analytical process, there was a distinct shift in the priority given to the different emphases in the research foci. This principally represented a shift from an interest in the individual in a cultural / national setting, towards a more meaningful emphasis on that of the individual in relation to shared discursive contexts and overarching thematic patterns, namely, how notions like duty, choice, role, values, well-being, contributions, and rights, are invoked by the research participants and play out more strongly in the ways in which the researcher could account for student teachers’ sense making of education, sustainable development and ESD.

The thesis presents its findings in three different forms of display; as Interview Case Summaries to engender understanding through ‘understanding the thinking and arguing of an individual’; as a series of themes accompanied by examples, extracts and vignettes from across the various student teacher groups; and finally, as an explorative framework that focuses on the process of personal decision-making for ascribing responsibility to oneself and others.

The main research findings document similarities and differences in the views and understanding(s) of these student teachers about SD, the purpose(s) of education and, in relation to these contexts, their perceptions of ESD, in particular in terms of how or whether they share that conceptions of ESD being about “generating a sense of responsibility”. More precisely, it is argued that conceptions of ESD can be described and distinguished in terms of at least four different rationalities on the process of personal decision-making for having / taking / accepting responsibility. These are termed: Type A (‘Internalist’); Type B (‘Reflective’); Type C (‘Regulative’); and Type D (‘Realist’).

These rationalities are located within a framework defined by two key dimensions: the nature of the decision-making process along a continuum that emphasises either principled or pragmatic forms of reasoning, and the location of agency along a continuum that emphasises either the ‘personal’ or ‘social/institutional’ as the agents and locus of the decision-making.

The substantive and methodological contribution of the project to research on teacher thinking and environmental education research, and in relation to teachers’ professional development and policy-making, rests primarily in the development of the explorative framework to interrogate substantive and theoretical themes and ideas emerging from the cases. In the latter stages of the thesis, the framework is also interpreted from a poststructuralist perspective and used as a critical, as well as explorative, generative ‘tool’ or ‘device’ for inquiring into multiple rationalities, the foundations and grounding of teacher thinking itself, and the role of decision-making in education in the context of ESD documents, discourses and practices.

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