Perception, Place, & Perspective: Teaching Sustainability Through Literature

Abstract

This study was a multi-phase research project that began by examining the perspectives of a sample of English-Language Arts (ELA) teachers’ self-reported identities as educators for sustainability and their knowledge of four dimensions of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The second phase was a secondary ELA curriculum developed to teach ESD through place-based literature. I conducted analyses of students’ notebooks, using a sustainability thematic coding rubric (Redman et al., 2021) to assess participants’ writing for evidence of sustainability competencies. In the third phase of this study, I investigated perspective transformation (PT) among adolescents’ reported educational experiences in an end-of-course Learning Activity Survey (LAS) after participating in the second phase of the study. In the first phase. I found that participating educators reported understanding ESD and that it was important, but they reportedly did not feel comfortable teaching all four dimensions of ESD. They reported that place-based education (PBE) was important but rarely used it. When asked about including diverse authors in their text choices, participating teachers reportedly believed it was important and reported that they often read from diverse authors, but when asked about indigenous authors, knowledge, and cultures, they reported they did not. In the second phase, I found that participating students’ interest in ESD was high. In the third phase, I found that more than half of participating students self-reported they had experienced perspective change, some directly related to the unit. I make recommendations for future research on ESD through ELA pedagogy and curriculum.