Reorienting Environmental Education in Ethiopia: Curricular Issues, Teachers’ View, and Practices
Doctoral thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3132374Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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- Institutt for lærerutdanning [3436]
Sammendrag
Environmental education plays a central role in fostering pro-environmental values and attitudes. The thesis provides a portrait of environmental education (EE) in four primary schools. The study involves textbooks, teachers’ perspectives on EE, and school practices. In Ethiopia, textbooks are developed centrally by the Ministry of Education and hold a significant place in school instruction. My initial engagement was the analysis of textbooks. I presumed that the views about human-nature relationships portrayed in the textbooks influence children’s environmental values and attitudes. The second component of the project constitutes teachers’ conceptualization of the environment and EE. Analysis of EE practices in schools followed, where I scrutinized lessons on environmental topics. Semi-structured interviews and lesson observations formed the principal instruments of data collection.
The findings show that textbooks dominantly convey the material and utilitarian value of nature, i.e. satisfying the material needs of humankind. Teachers’ conceptions of EE largely focus on conveying information about environmental issues, causes, and strategies to students. Teachers appear to assume that knowledge provided to students would be translated into pro-environmental behavior and actions, which is widely known as linear perspective. Concerning practices, lessons were predominantly confined to classrooms. Students were not provided with opportunities to actively engage in discussions, explore and analyze local environmental issues, hands-on engagement with the natural world, and participate in civic actions. Most teachers feel hindered by their lack of pedagogical knowledge for teaching children at the primary level. This was mainly due to a lack of pre-service and in-service training in the theoretical and practical aspects of EE. The conclusion is that with the existing pattern, EE appears to have a limited contribution to the formation of environmentally informed and active citizenry. Implications are drawn for teacher preparation and development, school practices, and further research.
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Paper 1: Gugssa, Mulugeta Awayehu; Aasetre, Jørund; Debele, Meskerem Lechissa. Views of “nature”, the “environment” and the “human-nature” relationships in Ethiopian primary school textbooks. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 2020 ;Volum 29. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1763564Paper 2: Gugssa, Mulugeta Awayehu; Aasetre, Jørund. Unveiling in-service teachers’ conceptions of ‘environment’ and ‘environmental education’: an Ethiopian perspective. Environmental Education Research 2022 ;Volum 29.(9) s. 1239-1258 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2022.2069681
Paper 3: Gugssa, Mulugeta Awayehu. Characterizing environmental education practices in Ethiopian primary schools. International Journal of Educational Development 102 (2023) 102848 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2023.102848 This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Paper 4: Gugssa, Mulugeta Awayehu. Barriers to environmental education in Ethiopia: do they differ from a global analysis?. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 2024 https://doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2024.2352285 This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).