Overview
- Provides practical guidance in the use of the Theory of Structuration in educational research
- Highlights reasons for the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of Education for Sustainability
- Provides recommendations for ensuring effective and long-lasting pedagogical change
Part of the book series: International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education (IEOEE, volume 1)
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About this book
The effectiveness of Education for Sustainable Development depends on the ability of schools and teachers to embrace pedagogies that reduce the gap between the rhetoric of education for the environment and the reality of classroom practices. This book responds to the need to better understand the nature of the relationships between agency and structure that contribute to the development of educational rhetoric-reality gaps in order to inform processes that most effectively facilitate pedagogical change.
This book explores the issues of pedagogical change through the experiences of Australian primary school teachers faced with the challenge of implementing an environmental education program in which young students were positioned as active participants in the social processes from which environmentally sustainable practices could be developed. These teachers were required to adopt pedagogies that often represented the antithesis of their well-established teacher-directed approaches.
Through the use of Anthony Giddens’ Theory of Structuration this book provides unique perspectives of the teacher mediated manner in which certain elements of structure and agency interrelate to enable and constrain classroom practices—essential understandings for school principals and educational policy developers who aim to effectively implement pedagogical change. This book also demonstrates that the Theory of Structuration provides a valuable ontological research framework, and provides social researchers with practical guidance for how to relate this theory to specific research issues.
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Keywords
- Anthony Giddens
- classroom practices
- critical pedagogy
- educational change
- elementary education
- environmental education
- ontology
- primary school
- structure agency duality
- sustainable development education
- sustainable schools
- sustainable schools program
- teacher agency
- teaching sustainability
- theory of structuration
- vignettes
- learning and instruction
Table of contents (9 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Socially-critical Environmental Education in Primary Classrooms
Book Subtitle: The Dance of Structure and Agency
Authors: Jane Edwards
Series Title: International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02147-8
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Education, Education (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-02146-1Published: 04 November 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-34720-2Published: 23 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-02147-8Published: 26 October 2015
Series ISSN: 2214-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2214-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 261
Number of Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations
Topics: Science Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Learning & Instruction