Master Thesis

Restorying our connection to the natural world:

Narrative research into teachers’ ecological awareness

By Katharine Burke

May 1st, 2021

Master Programme in Waldorf Education

Rudolf Steiner University College, Oslo, Norway

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Acknowledgement

To everyone involved in this master’s study, I offer my gratitude. Thank you for the depth of
this program, intellectually rigorous yet likewise filled with the sensuousness of nature, music
and dance, feelings of reflection, camaraderie and mirth, and new intuitive awakenings I had
not expected. This is the essence of good education, I believe, and I feel privileged to have
been able to be a part of it.
To all my teachers, with all your unique offerings, thank you. To Morten, for your calm
consistency and beautiful organization of the course; I will always remember your lecture on
muses and music. To Martin, for your evocative, poetic, phenomenological, and sensuous
offerings of deep ecological awareness- without you I would never have started this journey
or finished it, and you have enriched it along the way. To dear Yifan, for your wise and
perceptive guidance through this year, and for your patience with my fluster; you brought
coherence to my chaos.
To all my fellow students, oh my- I am so glad to have met and to know you. I carry
memories and stories that have become part of me. Thank you for the community, the
support, the love and joy. I will forever be river to your tree and cow. To my own school and
to colleagues there who have encouraged and supported me, to my husband and children and
all those who have put up with me over these three years, thank you. To Elizabeth, thank you
so much for your fine editing and proofreading, without which I could not have managed, as
well as for your kind encouragement.
And finally, to the participants in this study, my most profound gratitude for your offering of
stories. I have understood what a gift these are; in times of quiet solitude I hear your words. I
will forever be touched more deeply by the smell of pine on my fingers, the rattle of reeds,
birdsong and a bubbling stream or rushing waterfall, the stars at night, a mountain path, kelp
at the sea and the gaze of a lizard or call of a crow. Thank you for offering these stories into
being.
I feel the largesse of the gift I have received over the past three years. I offer this work in
reciprocity.

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Abstract

Teachers’ stories are the foundation for this qualitative research into the development of
ecological awareness. The purpose is to add empirical research to the study of pathways
toward ecological awareness as one way of approaching the ecological crisis, and to answer
the call for education for sustainability in schools. The research aims to answer the questions,
what are teachers’ narratives regarding their development of ecological awareness, what are
their reflections of how their ecological awareness influences their interactions in schools, and
what suggestions for improvement of educational practice can be made?. Eight teachers from
state, international and alternative schools took the revised New Ecological Paradigm survey,
wrote biographical sketches and participated in face-to-face semi-structured interviews. The
study uses a modified biographic narrative interpretive method, and employs arts-based
narrative research together with thematic analysis to analyze and interpret these teacher’s
stories. Findings provide empirical evidence that unrestricted time in nature with sensual and
emotional connection contributes to the development of ecological awareness. In addition,
they confirm the importance of solitude in fostering profound nature experiences, and the
importance of casual mentors in developing ecocentric views. The study also points to the
importance of environment and ecological education to contributing to ecological awareness.
As such the study argues for increased unstructured and unrestricted time in nature with
casual mentoring in ecological awareness, together with increased emphasis on teaching
environmental and ecological science and ethics, and on supporting teachers with ecocentric
values to promote education for sustainability in schools. Finally, it suggests that stories
themselves are a foundation for creating access to ones’ own ecological awareness and can be
instrumental in prompting change in schools.

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Content

Acknowledgement ...................................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii
Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 7
1.1 Choice of topic ................................................................................................................. 7
1.2 Research questions ........................................................................................................... 9
1.3 Methods .......................................................................................................................... 10
1.4 Conceptual framework ................................................................................................... 11
1.5 Positionality statement ................................................................................................... 11
1.6 Structure of the thesis ..................................................................................................... 12
Chapter 2: Literature review ................................................................................................... 13
2.1 Introduction to the literature review ............................................................................... 13
2.2 Environmental awareness as school curricula ................................................................ 14
2.3 Theories and research on the development of ecological awareness ............................. 18
2.4 Pathways toward developing ecological awareness ....................................................... 18
2.4.1 Experiential pathways: nature connectedness, being, sensing and feeling ............. 21
2.4.2 The aesthetic pathway: an expression of sensing and feeling ................................. 22
2.4.3 Intellectual pathways: science, ecology, and educational experiences ................... 23
2.4.4 Existential pathways: intuition, encounter, and transformation .............................. 23
2.4.5 Social (or non-social) pathways toward ecological awareness. .............................. 25
2.5 Conceptual framework ................................................................................................... 27
2.6 Empirical research into developing teacher’s ecological awareness and interaction in
schools .................................................................................................................................. 27
2.6.1 Developing ecological awareness ........................................................................... 27
2.6.2 Working in schools.................................................................................................. 30
2.7 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 32
Chapter 3 Design, methodology and methods ......................................................................... 33
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 33
3.2 Epistemology .................................................................................................................. 33
3.2.1 Interpretivism .......................................................................................................... 33
3.2.2 Beyond human language ......................................................................................... 33
3.2.3 Story as a way of knowing ...................................................................................... 34
3.2.4 Ecologies of knowledge .......................................................................................... 34
3.3 Narrative approach with interpretive analysis. ............................................................... 35
3.4 Data collection methods ................................................................................................ 37
3.4.1 Biographic narrative interpretive method ............................................................... 37
3.4.2 New ecological paradigm survey ............................................................................ 38
3.4.3 Semi-structured interviews ...................................................................................... 39
3.5 Data analysis .................................................................................................................. 40
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 3.5.1 Procedure ................................................................................................................. 40
3.5.2 Thematic analysis .................................................................................................... 41
3.6 Sampling of participants................................................................................................. 44
3.7 Quality considerations .................................................................................................... 45
3.8 Ethical Considerations.................................................................................................... 47
Chapter 4: Findings .................................................................................................................. 49
4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 49
4.2 Presentations................................................................................................................... 50
4.2.1. ‘Sarah’ .................................................................................................................... 50
4.2.2 ‘Wendy’ ................................................................................................................... 52
4.2.3. ‘Stacy’ .................................................................................................................... 53
4.2.4 ‘Brian’ ..................................................................................................................... 55
4.2.5 ‘Beth’....................................................................................................................... 56
4.2.6 ‘Martin’ ................................................................................................................... 57
4.2.7 ‘Kevin’ ................................................................................................................... 59
4.2.8 ‘ Terry’ .................................................................................................................... 60
4.3 Analysis .......................................................................................................................... 61
4.3.1 Analysis by narrative ............................................................................................... 62
4.3.2 Worldview ............................................................................................................... 62
4.3.3 Themes .................................................................................................................... 65
4.3.4 Themes common to participants ............................................................................. 65
4.3.5 Pathways toward ecological awareness................................................................... 70
4.4 Reflections on teaching and schools .............................................................................. 76
4.5 The way forward ............................................................................................................ 78
Chapter 5: Discussion............................................................................................................... 80
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 80
5.2 A nuanced ecological awareness .................................................................................... 80
5.3 The accretive nature of ecological awareness ................................................................ 81
5.4 Pathways toward ecological awareness. ......................................................................... 82
5.4.1 Reviewing pathways toward ecological awareness. ............................................... 82
5.4.2 Unfettered access to nature and the quality of timelessness .................................. 84
5.4.3 Community and the casual mentor .......................................................................... 85
5.4.4 Summary of pathways toward ecological awareness .............................................. 86
5.5 Interactions and relationships in schools. ....................................................................... 87
Chapter 6: Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 89
6.1 Conclusion of the research ............................................................................................. 89
6.2 Study evaluation: quality, limitations and recommendations ........................................ 90
6.2.1 Quality ..................................................................................................................... 90
6.2.2 Limitations and recommendations .......................................................................... 91
6.3 Contributions .................................................................................................................. 92
6.4 Implications and directions for future research .............................................................. 93
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 6.4.1 Implications for ecological awareness development ............................................... 93
6.4.2 Implications for education ....................................................................................... 94
6.4.3 Directions for further research ................................................................................ 95
6.5 Researcher reflections .................................................................................................... 95
Works cited .............................................................................................................................. 97
Appendixes ............................................................................................................................. 101
Appendix 1: NEP ............................................................................................................... 101
Appendix 2: Proposed interview guide .............................................................................. 102
Appendix 3: Request for participation ............................................................................... 104
Appendix 4: Consent form ................................................................................................. 107
Appendix 5: Instructions for NEP and biographical sketch ............................................... 108
Appendix 6: Deep ecology principles ............................................................................... 110
Appendix 7: Other scales used: Nature Connectedness Scale Extended Inclusion of Nature
in Self Scale ........................................................................................................................ 111
Appendix 8: Sample of analysis and theme building ........................................................ 112
Appendix 9: Examples from the reflection journal: ........................................................... 113

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Chapter 1: Introduction

A young girl, maybe six or seven, stood on the vast expanse of lawn. It was not what she was
used to. In her world, everything was hard and vertical; grey pavements and small alleyways,
dark streets and brick tenements rising six stories into smog-filled skies. Here, the horizontal
seemed to stretch forever, flat and green under a brilliant sun, smelling of damp earth and the
richness of growing things. She moved cautiously across the grass, feeling her feet sink into
the spongy earth. At the edge of the lawn was a huge weeping willow with leafy vines
trailing all the way down to the ground. It was like a magic curtain, which she parted
carefully with her hand. Inside was more magic still; here the smell of bark and leaf litter and
earth was palpable, the sunlight dappled, the ground beneath her feet dark and soft. She felt a
sense of safety and quiet, seldom in the cityscape she came from.

The girl in this descriptive narrative is me, and this is the earliest memory I have of being
surrounded by nature, even if it was only the lawn in an institutional setting, just outside of
New York City, where I had been born and lived on the Lower East Side. I can still
remember the feeling and the sense of that moment; it may be what propelled me to
constantly pursue ways of gardening, living on the land, studying permaculture, and
eventually, to a master’s in Ecology, Sustainability and Nature.

1.1 Choice of topic

As a teacher, I have become increasingly aware of and concerned by the growing ecological
crisis. In 2018, the IPCC Report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Summary for
Policymakers (IPCC, 2018) stated that in order to avoid the most catastrophic changes of
climate change there would need to be a reduction of global net human-caused carbon
dioxide emissions of about 45% from 2010 to 2030, suggesting that we had 12 years to get
carbon emissions under control. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres followed the release
of the report with remarks on Sept. 10, 2018, that characterized the situation as “a direct
existential threat” (Guterres, 2018, para. 1). At the time, I remember thinking to myself, that
this is the time it takes for a child to pass from first grade through secondary school
graduation in our school systems. Teachers are harbingers of culture through the curricula
and norms they teach. What is it that we should be teaching to make sure we meet the “great
challenge of our times” (Guterres, 2018, para. 18), and how do we develop the skills, ethics
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and understanding to do so? Considering the crisis at hand and the potential of teachers and
schools to address it, I believe it is valid to research this area. Addressing the need for
changes in schools, Bonnett (2010) remarks,

Given the perceived seriousness and extent of the environmental degradation

alluded to above, it would be hard to argue that education should not make some
response. It is difficult to think of a more pressing set of issues that confronts
citizens of the early twenty-first century. (p. 516)
As a teacher of sixteen year-olds in Norway, I am aware of that pressure on my students, and
their need for direction from me and other adults to navigate their way through the next
decades.

According to the new teacher plan put out by the Norwegian Directorate for Education for
2020 (Udir, n.d.) sustainability is one of three interdisciplinary themes that should be
addressed by all schools in Norway, together with citizenship and wellness. In the description
for sustainability, the new teacher plan states a goal that “In working with this topic the
pupils shall develop competence which enables them to make responsible choices and to act
ethically and with environmental awareness” (Udir, n.d., para. 2.5.3).

An ecocentric stance

Crucial to environmental awareness as examined by this thesis, is an understanding that

humans are nature and a part of the systemic ecology of the natural world, which is a stance
taken for biocentrism rather than anthropocentrism, as described by Thompson and Barton
(1994). An anthropocentric view regards humans as actors on nature to manage and control
resources. Humans are seen as the recipient of nature’s largesse, which has value insofar as it
contributes toward the goal of human development. An ecocentric point of view, on the other
hand, is concerned with the entire health of ecosystems for the benefit of all living beings,
who are perceived to have intrinsic worth regardless of their usefulness to humans
(Thompson & Barton, 1994). Washington, et. al. (2017) argue for the validity of a theory of
ecocentrism on ethical, spiritual, evolutionary and ecological grounds, and say of its major
premise,

The theory of autonomous intrinsic value of nature frees humanity from its
anthropocentric obsession that it is all about our valuing. It states clearly that
nature has intrinsic value, whether or not humans perceive and acknowledge this.
(p. 38)

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It is the second, ecocentric view I will work from in this thesis. A discussion of
environmental awareness must include the more than human world in equal measure as
sustainability for humans. As Hadzigeorgiou and Skoumios (2013) argue, understanding our
interconnectedness with nature is paramount to developing environmental awareness, since it
is that realization which will develop an appreciation of the natural world as well as our
respect for it and ethical responsibility toward it. Environmental awareness should be viewed
as more than a knowledge of environmental problems or a juxtaposition of environmental
themes interconnected with social and economic issues; it includes an understanding of our
interconnectedness with nature, framed in ecological and systemic thinking, as Goodwin
(2016) also notes,

This crisis is not just about environmental issues. It is also about how humans
interact with the world. It is a crisis of perception involving a lack of ecological
or systemic thinking; it is a crisis fuelled by a lack of purposeful, philosophical
thought. This deficiency in considered thought is not only present in the everyday
lives of ordinary citizens, but also in education. This results in a general lack of
understanding of one’s place in an ecological world. (p. 288)
In this thesis I have thus chosen to use the phrase ‘ecological awareness’ in order to highlight
the systemic interconnectedness of the natural world, which does not translate as clearly with
the word ‘environmental’, that may be seen as simply the surrounding spaces. I believe this
distinction between environmental and ecological awareness is important, as it reflects the
difference between and anthropocentric and ecocentric points of view. For teachers to lead
students toward ecological awareness, they must first embody the ethics and awareness they
seek to foster and must themselves develop the values they are asked to teach (Goodwin,
2016). This is important to education since the evolving ecological views of teachers will
interact with the school environment as well as with students’ worldviews. Teaching is an act
of socialization, and teachers, acting on behalf of the teaching institutions and the societies in
which they teach, pass on the values and beliefs of those institutions. Teachers will also
naturally present, even if unconsciously, the worldviews they hold (Moroye 2009).

1.2 Research questions

There are many theories on how ecological awareness might be developed (Capra, 2005;
Harding, 2016; Louv, 2006; Lumber et al., 2017; Orr, 2004) but there is a need for empirical
studies that add teachers’ own voices to the discussion. To this end, I became interested in
hearing from teachers with ecological views, and to learn from them how this had come

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about. As with my own story of the willow tree that remains with me until today, I wondered
if narrative might be a way for teachers to access the origins of their ecological thinking. I
was interested, therefore, in the stories they could tell about how that awareness had
developed, and their reflections on how that awareness might affect their ethics, perceptions
and interactions with students, fellow staff, or administration in schools. I wondered if their
reflections and experiences could help us improve sustainability education. Thus, my three
research question are,

RQ1. What are teachers’ narrated life experiences regarding the development of their
ecological awareness?

RQ2. What are these teacher’s reflections on how their ecological awareness influences their
world view, ethics, and interactions in schools?

RQ3. How can these stories and reflections be described, understood, and interpreted to
improve educational practice, and especially education for sustainability?

1.3 Methods
I have chosen to conduct my research through qualitative research using a narrative
approach. Specifically, I have chosen to use a biographic narrative interpretive method
(Wengraf, 2008). Narratives begin “with the experiences expressed in lived and told stories
of individuals” (Creswell, 2007, p. 2). Stories incorporate memory, values, perceptions and
one’s sense of self. As such they are both personal and non-transferable but at the same time
give insights into emotions, sensations and perceptions that might otherwise not be revealed.
Although stories are told of a time, and often chronologically, they are also timeless, in the
sense that “Stories are a reflection of the fact that experience is a matter of growth and that
understandings are continually developed, reshaped and retold, often informally” (Mertova &
Webster, 2020, p. 12). Stories of nature connectedness and ecological awareness allow for
multiple ways of knowing to present themselves through narratives. Stories are co-
constructed, social, and emergent. They both underpin cultural values, reflecting and
reinforcing social paradigms, and can bring new perceptions and ways of being to life, thus
remolding and changing cultures. In this way, I think, the use of story in research can allow
for deeper understanding of cultural and social values and ethics.

The narratives in this study were gathered from eight teachers in six different schools
including two state (government) schools, two international schools, and two alternative
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schools as well as teachers who were consultants to several schools. Data collection included
the completion of a survey on ecological values (Dunlop, et. al., 2000) and the elicitation of a
short written biographical sketch followed by a semi-structured interview. I have presented
my participants’ biographies and life events through both chronological time and through
arts-based interpretive fictionalization of story (Kim, 2016; Leavy, 2016).

1.4 Conceptual framework

The conceptual framework for the study is built around four pathways toward ecological
awareness in combination with three types of social interaction that might affect or enhance
those pathways. The four pathways toward development of ecological awareness that are
explored are intellectual pathways, or what one knows at the mind level, embracing reading,
schooling, and other types of knowledge pursuits, experiential pathways, or what one
experiences bodily, including sensing, feeling, and being in place, existential pathways, or
what one understands oneself to be; including intuitive, spiritual, or other transformational
understandings, and the aesthetic pathway, or perception of beauty and art. The first three
pathways are inspired by Harding’s (2016) discussion of Jungian ways of knowing while the
aesthetic pathway was suggested by Lumber, et al. (2017). The three social interactions
which serve as the other facet of the conceptual framework are community, or larger group
interactions in social settings, such as discussed by Macy and Johnstone (2012), guidance, or
personal interactions with a mentor or other influential figures, as discussed in Louv (2006),
Orr (2004), and Young, et al. (2010) and solitude, or solo reflection or interaction in nature,
as presented by Abram (2011), Rosenkrans (2017), and White (2009).

1.5 Positionality statement

I am deeply concerned by the ecological crisis. My ecological awareness has changed
profoundly over the past 10 years or so, and I hold an ecocentric worldview. I am not sure
how my own ecological awareness developed, and curiosity about that was part of what led
me to this research project. I have been influenced greatly by the content of the humanities
subjects I teach and by my own students’ engagement and anxiety over climate change. A
course in permaculture gardening led me to a summer course in ecology at Schumacher
College with Dr. Stephen Harding, which led me to reading about and working with
ecological awareness, and finally, to this masters’ program. I am, therefore, an insider

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(Holmes 2020) on the topic of ecological awareness, and will illuminate that throughout the
thesis in order to signpost potential bias in my research.

1.6 Structure of the thesis

The next chapter in this thesis is a literature review that highlights relevant theoretical and
empirical research in ecological awareness and presents the conceptual framework for my
inquiry. Following that, in Chapter 3, I describe the methodology for the work and discuss
factors influencing quality and ethical considerations. In Chapter 4 I present the findings
from my research, and in Chapter 5 I discuss these in relation to the literature review.
Chapter 6 presents my conclusions, evaluation, implications and recommendations for further
research, as well as my own reflections.

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Chapter 2: Literature review

2.1 Introduction to the literature review

In this literature review, I will look at how the concept of environmental awareness has
become increasingly important in schools’ curricula. I will review the work of ecologists,
scientists, and philosophers theorizing on the development of ecological awareness and
follow this with a discussion of empirical studies that may support or challenge these. I have
also sought to look at empirical studies of teachers’ development of ecological awareness and
of issues of ecological and environmental awareness in schools.

I started my search by reading books and articles listed in my masters’ course compendiums,
and then read the works cited in those, ordering ebooks online or buying the paper copies. I
performed my own searches through BASE, Jstor, Core, Google Scholar, Researchgate,
Academia, and other search engines. I searched for articles on not just measurement of
ecological awareness but studies on development, reflections, and narratives, preferably by
teachers. I sought to create a wide and general underpinning for the theory of ecological
awareness, yet, in light of the research questions, a narrower focus on teachers for the
empirical studies. I was looking for studies that included teachers’ stories and reflections
including their experiences in nature and in schools. This meant searching through multiple
search terms, since the field has so many competing terms and definitions, including
environmental, ecological, or nature/al, and awareness, consciousness, intelligence, literacy,
and connectedness. and then development, narrative, reflections, stories, and memories in
addition to teachers, educators, education, and schools.

After culling for the parameters above, I read and selected a workable number of suitably
diverse empirical studies that also represented to some degree teachers’ development of
ecological awareness over time with reflections or stories, although some of these discuss
development of ecological awareness in adults who are not necessarily teachers, and some of
the teachers’ studies are not wholly focused on development. I also read the Norwegian
curriculum and researched the development of sustainability education worldwide, which I
will start my review with.

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2.2 Environmental awareness as school curricula
Environmental awareness was addressed by that term in an international context at the Tbilisi
conference in 1977 (United Nations Environmental Program, 1977). The conference
acknowledged that “environmental education should be integrated into the whole system of
formal education at all levels” (United Nations Environmental Program, 1977, p. 12). It
urged signatories to “provide every person with opportunities to acquire the knowledge,
values, attitudes, commitment and skills needed to protect and improve the environment” (p.
26) and “create new patterns of behavior of individuals, groups and society as a whole
towards the environment” (United Nations Environmental Program, 1977, p. 25).

In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian

Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined sustainable development as “Sustainable
development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising
the ability to meet those of the future” (World Commission on Environment and
Development, 1987, p. 39). Although this sentence is often used to define sustainable
development, the following sentence is less known,

Far from requiring the cessation of economic growth, it recognizes that the
problems of poverty and underdevelopment cannot be solved unless we have a
new era of growth in which developing countries play a large role and reap large
benefits. (WCED, 1987, p. 39)
Linking environmental devastation with cultural social and economic issues, which the
report does, is important, but offering development as the solution to environmental
devastation amounts to what De Sousa Santos (2016) calls a weak answer to a strong
problem. De Sousa Santos (2016) asks, “Is the conception of nature as separate from society,
so entrenched in Western thinking, tenable in the long run?” (p. 40). He argues that

…the insatiable exploitation of nature must have an end, lest human life on the
planet become unsustainable. This is perhaps the strong question that raises the
most perplexity, since all Western thinking, whether critical or not, is grounded
on the Cartesian idea that nature is a res extensa and, as such, an unlimited
resource unconditionally available to human beings. (De Sousa Santos, 2016,
page 40)
The Brundtland report, in pairing the environmental crisis with continued growth of resource
use for the benefit of humans, takes an anthropocentric rather than ecocentric point of view
(Thompson & Barton, 1994). This has established the concept of sustainability as an

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anthropocentric modification of resource use for human benefit, which will ultimately also
affect education for sustainability.

In 2005, The United Nations Document Guidelines and Recommendations for Reorienting
Teacher Education to Address Sustainability (UNESCO, 2005) sought to establish guidelines
for reorienting education to address sustainability. The report identifies the responsibility of
ministries of education in mandating curriculum change in education for sustainability
(ESD), saying “If sustainability is mandated, it is far easier to reorient curriculum to address
it than if incorporating ESD into the curriculum is optional” (UNESCO, 2005, p. 31).

The core curriculum in Norway (Udir, n.d.) includes respect for nature and environmental
awareness as one of six core values, and maintains that schools should “help the pupils to
develop an appreciation of nature” so they can “enjoy and respect nature and develop climate
and environmental awareness” (Udir, n.d. para.1.5), The document cites “global climate
changes, pollution and loss of biological diversity” as “some of the greatest environmental
threats in the world” (Udir, n.d. para.1.5), and acknowledges that our future depends on the
ability and will of the children we raise to “make the necessary changes to our lifestyles to
protect life on Earth” (Udir, n.d. para. 1.5). Doing this requires teachers who are trained,
able and aware enough to lead children toward deep appreciation, care, and ecological
awareness. This is clearly a tall order for our children, and just as daunting a task for
teachers.
Even with a core value of appreciation for nature, the Norwegian curriculum’s mandates for
sustainable development in education focus on the human, social and economic facets of
development, which Thompson and Barton (1994) identify as anthropocentric, rather than
ecocentric attitudes toward the environment. The curriculum (Udir, n.d.) states that
“Sustainable development as an interdisciplinary topic in school shall help the pupils to
understand basic dilemmas and developments in society and how they can be dealt with”
(Udir, n.d., para 2.5.3), since sustainable development is based on the understanding that
“social economic and environmental conditions are interconnected” (Udir, n.d., para. 2.5.3).
By linking environmental conditions to social and economic issues, this articulation echoes
the Brundtland report in focusing on human needs above those of the more than human
world, unless they promote growth for humans. Capra and Luisi (2016) on the other hand,
define sustainability as “to design a human community in such a way that its activities do not
interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life” (p. 353), reflecting that this definition

15
involves, as a first step, understanding nature and how it works to sustain life. This definition
is one that is ecocentric.
The new Norwegian curriculum’s emphasis on ethics in environmental awareness (Udir, n.d.)
also poses the question of what new ethics and values might be taught and how. The authors
of the New Ecological Paradigm (Dunlap, et al., 2000), argue that “we are in the midst of a
fundamental reevaluation of the underlying worldview that has guided our relationship to the
physical environment” (p. 2). They term this a new ecological paradigm and identify a
distinction between the “antienvironmental thrust of our society’s dominant social paradigm”
(Dunlap, et al., 2000, p. 3), and this new ecological paradigm that heralds values regarding
all living beings as of equal value despite their usefulness to human societies (Næss, 2016).
Dunlap et al.(2000) argue that, “it seems reasonable to regard a coherent set of these beliefs
as constituting a paradigm or worldview that influences attitudes and beliefs toward more
specific environmental issues” (p. 4).

Goodwin (2016) argues that despite the increase in environmental education, schools have
not been successful in changing values and ethics, summarizing research on the development
of knowledge and behavior among students who had received environmental education. He
concludes that “Even as there has been some improvement in environmental behavior, there
has not been much overall improvement in fundamental knowledge, ecological
understanding or transformed perception of an ecological nature” (Goodwin, 2016, p. 4).
Developing ecological awareness will require that teachers have shifted to a new worldview
themselves, as Howard (2012) claims,

The education of the teachers responsible for our children’s learning, must reflect
a different consciousness than one that sees the destruction of … the earth as
inevitable by-products of “progress”. We must educate so we see ourselves as
part of the web of life, not simply isolated self-maximizing individuals. (p. 11)

Howard (2012) also points out that although teachers are expected to teach sustainability, to
do this they must “question whether education in its current form, may be an obstacle to
realizing sustainable communities” (p. 6). It raises the issue, discussed by many other
ecological educators including Capra (2016) Orr (2004), Reed (2015), and Vetlesen (2015) of
how teachers who are living and teaching within an anthropocentric value system will teach a
new set of ecocentric values and ethics. This dilemma highlights why it is so important that
teachers develop an ecological awareness that includes seeing humanity as an interconnected

16
part of the living world, in order to meet the Norwegians curriculum’s values to “make
changes in our lifestyle that will protect life on Earth” (Udir, n.d., para. 2.5.3). To do this,
Howard (2012) calls for a care model to develop values toward sustainable education. He
cautions against the teaching of sustainability as reductionist science- while recognizing the
importance of what science does, the development of mere knowledge is not what propels us
to care enough to change our values. He reminds us that it is this generation of teacher who
will instill the next generation’s sustainable values, and that this cannot be done without
those teachers challenging existing values (Howard, 2012).
Capra (2016) notes that this will entail a shift in perceptions toward an understanding that
“we are all members of humanity, and we all belong to a global biosphere” (p. 390), and that
“we need to remember that sustainability – in ecosystems as well as in human society – is not
an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships” (p. 390). It will
include what Orr (2004), calls biophilia, or a love of life, and entail a shift “from theorizing
nature to experiencing nature” (Vetlesen, 2015, p. 2). All of these might be summed up with
Leopold’s (1970) ‘land ethic’, first published in 1949, which “changes the role of homo
sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it” (p. 240).
This ethic includes a shift in ecological conscience as well as changes in “intellectual
emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions” (Leopold, 1970, p. 246) and culminates in
the understanding that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the stability, integrity and
beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (p. 262). It is this type
of ethics formation that is underpinned by an ecocentric view of human and non-human
relationships.

In the next section of the literature review, I will explore literature that investigates how we
might develop ecological awareness that is ecocentric in nature. Reviewing the literature on
ecological awareness, it becomes clear that there are many competing terminologies around
the concepts of ‘ecological’ and ‘awareness’. Literature may use the terms ‘environmental’
and ‘ecological’ somewhat interchangeably, although McBride, et al. (2013) point out that
the trend has moved from the discussion of environmental literacy pre-1980s to ecological
literacy or ecological studies through the 80s and then more recently, the concept of
ecoliteracy was coined to account for both a foundation of ecological knowledge and an
understanding of nature connectedness. This thesis uses the term ecological awareness to
address the concept of a new ecological paradigm, or shift in perception toward ecological
ethics. However, the literature varies in its terminology, from ecological consciousness,
17
(O’Sullivan & Taylor, 2004; Ull, 2013), ecological literacy (Goleman, et. al, 2012; Orr,
2004), ecological identity (Thomashow, 2005), ecological self (Næss, 2016) as well as to
nature connectedness (Young, et al. 2010) and deep ecological experience (Harding, 2016).
Although I will consistently use the term ecological awareness for the reasons explained in
the introduction to the thesis, the literature quoted will use these various terms, and I will
make distinctions between them where necessary.

2.3 Theories and research on the development of ecological

awareness
The human psyche may contain an innate ecological intelligence that is a basic element of
self. Næss (2016) has said that the basic question is one of who we really already are,
asserting that since “We tend to confuse our self with the narrow ego. We underestimate
ourselves” (p. 81), because we are both in and of nature from the very beginning. Shepard
(1998) echoes this with the affirmation that although we have lost our connection to it, “there
is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions,
sensitive to their right moments in our lives” (p. 39). Roszak (1995) also speaks of an innate
ecological identity, saying, “Ecopsychology holds that there is a greater ecological
intelligence as deeply rooted in the foundations of the psyche as the sexual and aggressive
instincts Freud found there” (p.6). Orr’s (2004) description of biophilia, based on the
nomenclature of O.E. Wilson, also describes an innate attraction to the natural world, while
juxtaposing this with an equally innate biophobia, or fear of the natural world. Orr (2004)
then introduces the question of whether we in western civilization are in a situation where we
have developed biophobia in an entire society. These positions lead to a view that ecological
awareness is an attribute to be reclaimed, rather than developed out of nothing. They also
reinforce the idea that ecological awareness is more than just knowledge about the
environment or natural systems, and more than a management of resources for human
development, but indeed an innate part of who we are as humans in relation to the rest of the
non-human world.

2.4 Pathways toward developing ecological awareness

Although theories in the literature that explore developing ecological awareness (Abram,
2011; Harding, 2016; Louv, 2006; Macy, & Johnstone, 2012; Orr, 2004; Ull, 2013; and
Young, et al., 2010) do not contradict the work of the eco-psychologists and eco-

18
philosophers above, they focus instead on how the development, or perhaps reclaiming, of
ecological awareness might take place. In order to address the many different pathways to
ecological awareness suggested by the literature, it is necessary to have a framework to settle
them in.

In setting up my own conceptual framework, I have used as a starting point Harding’s (2016)
employment of Jung’s ways of knowing, or psychological modes of experiencing and
understanding the world; that is, knowledge, feeling, sensing, and intuiting, as a way of
exploring various pathways toward ecological awareness. Harding (2016) tells stories of four
ecologists’ experiences to illustrate his understanding of ecological awareness developed
through intuition, senses, emotion and intellect. These stories, summarized below, are all
attributed to Harding (2016). Aldo Leopold famously had a conversion when he looked into
the eyes of a dying wolf he had shot on the side of a mountain, which Harding identifies as
an intuitional response. David Abram had a deeply sensuous experience in a cave with rain
falling and small spiders weaving webs when he was caught out in a rainstorm. Arne Næss
felt a strong feeling of relationship to the mountain he had promised to live on as a boy, and
James Lovelock came to a profound intellectual understanding of Earth’s self-regulating life
enhancing systems while puzzling out the possibility of life on other planets. These
distinctions that Harding (2016) makes may denote propensities in thinking and knowing,
although they are obviously not as single-faceted as this. Leopold had years of intellectual
training in forestry, and his experience also led to an emotional response. Næss was
academically trained as a philosopher before he developed his theories of deep ecology.
There may well have been other ways of knowing at work in the transformations of Abram
and Lovelock as well. Nevertheless, the four stories mark particularly meaningful transitions,
and the categories provide a starting point for exploring the pathways that might lead to
ecological awareness.

Another contribution to my conceptual framework comes from an empirical investigation of

pathways toward ecological awareness performed more recently by Lumber, et al. (2017),
which took as its starting point the nine values of the biophilia hypothesis. The conclusion of
this study, which set up various activities in the context of a walk in nature, was that emotion,
meaning, compassion, and beauty, (equated in the study with the biophilia naturalistic,
aesthetic, symbolic, humanistic and moralistic values) are effective means to developing
ecological awareness. However, considering the narrow timeframe of the study; a 20 minute

19
walk of 726 meters, the fairly contrived activities, the short time between the walk and a
survey of nature connectedness based on the Nature Connectedness Scale, it is difficult to
know if the measured increase in nature connectedness was profound or lasting.
Regardless, this empirical research does contribute some interesting pathways to explore,
especially aesthetic experiences. Lumber et al. (2017) use the label beauty for aesthetics,
which I find problematic, since beauty is in fact a human designation and as such is not
something that nature contains but that humans perceive. In fact, beauty, as a human
distinction, may well be a convergence of the two Jungian ways of knowing, sensual and
emotional. Therefore I prefer the term aesthetic. Also Lumber et al.’s (2017) quality of
‘meaning’ is difficult to ascertain. In the study, participants were asked to stop and spend
“five minutes writing down the meaning of any symbolism they could infer from the nature
they could see or had seen on the walk” (Lumbar, et al. 2017, p. 18). This meaning of
symbolism that the participants noted might have been experienced and expressed as an
intellectual understanding or a more intuitional interpretation, thus making it difficult to
determine how it was perceived by the respondents. Nevertheless, Lumber, et al.’s (2017)
pathways of both emotion and compassion are relatable to Harding’s (2016) discussion of
Jungian ways of knowing and Næss’s (2016) emphasis on empathy. Moreover, the study’s
conclusion that “There is a need to move beyond a superficial contact with nature or focusing
exclusively on knowledge and identification, when fostering a relationship with nature”
(Lumbar et al. 2017, p. 22) is worth investigating more closely.
These discussions by Harding (2016) and Lumbar et. al. (2017) suggest a conceptual
framework based on various types of pathways toward ecological literacy. Amalgamating
these, the four main concepts I will employ are intellectual pathways (educational, literary, or
knowledge-based), experiential pathways (bodily experience including feeling, sensing and
contact in nature and in place), and existential pathways (intuitional, spiritual or transitional
shifts in understanding of who one is or of relation to the larger world), as well as a pathway
I am calling aesthetic, denoting the perception of beauty in nature or artistic form. In
addition, there is a social dimension to activating ecological awareness which I will also
discuss through the literature that follows and which I would like to explore, namely the
concepts of community, guidance, and solitude. I will discuss these further in the chapter.

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2.4.1 Experiential pathways: nature connectedness, being, sensing and feeling

It is my assertion that direct interaction by being in nature both instigates knowing through
the senses and can bring up strong emotions, all elements of experiential knowing. Being in
nature is claimed as a powerful pathway to discovering one’s ecological awareness (Abram,
2011; Louv, 2006; Vetlesen, 2015; Young, et al, 2010). Famously, Louv (2006) described the
negative effects of nature deficit disorder and prescribed time in nature as a remedy. Young,
et al. (2010) describes work with children and young people using indigenous nature
practices to reconnect and re-sensitize them to nature through the senses. Abram (2011) also
emphasizes the importance of our senses in connecting to the more than human world,
noting, “This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary
instrument for all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos” (p. 8).
Vetlesen (2015) speaks of the ways in which increasing technology has allowed us to
continue to distance ourselves from the direct experience of nature. He describes trees, no
longer felled by hand, where one could experience the “body-sensuous nature” (p.148) of the
axe against the tree, but instead by huge, computerized cutters that physically and psychically
distance the human from the world outside the cab of the machine. Thus, one pathway to
ecological awareness can thus be through direct nature experiences that ignite the senses.

Another facet of the experiential connectedness to nature is emotional, and in fact, I posit
that profound sensual interactions will have an attendant emotional character. Næss (2016)
recognizes the nurturing of empathy in deep identification with the rest of the natural world
as essential in creating a sense of connection with other beings. Shepard (1998), Roszak
(1995), and Macy and Johnstone (2012) all describe deep emotions of grief that develop
when one is separated from identification with nature and call for the acknowledgement of
this grief in redeveloping empathy and connectedness. Orr (2004) also focuses on emotions
in the development of ecological awareness, acknowledging the need for biophilia, the deep
attachment that moves the individual from love as ‘eros’ or desire to possess, to love as
‘agape’ or the desire to sacrifice for that which one cherishes. If we allow for all of these
views, we can conclude that both positive emotions such as empathy or love, and negative
emotions such as grief, can propel an individual toward ecological awareness.

Coming into connection with the natural world can also result in emotional responses such as
awe, timelessness, and freedom. Ull (2013) describes developing ecological awareness by
cultivating time in relation to nature as kairos, Greek for a present time that is unconnected to

21
the time of clocks or calendars, and imbued with the experience of the immediate- land, sky,
weather, temperature, movements and sensations, as opposed to the Greek chronos
(measured time). Aerts (2019) refers to “the mood of Aeon time as a passage of time
experience with a timeless quality and beyond clock-measure” (p. 57). She identifies
circumstances that can serve as bridges to timelessness (p.69) and that might arise for young
children in deep play but also in nature. There is a sense of freedom inherent in this
immediate sense of time (Aerts, 2019; Louv, 2006). White (2009), in his personal experience,
also confirms this aspect of timelessness in nature, as he says,

The more I was immersed in the present moment within a natural setting, the
more connected I felt with a place and the less cognisant or caring of linear time I
became. I became so engrossed during many of my structured exercises that I
ceased to be aware of time passing. (p. 287)
A connected reading of these various views offers an understanding of nature as a place
where time might stand still in relation to human clock measurement, and to the freedom in
that. Although this may be a special facet of childhood, as Aerts (2019) suggests, it might
also be reclaimed, or even remembered and then reconnected to, by adults, as White (2009)
describes.

2.4.2 The aesthetic pathway: an expression of sensing and feeling

A final pathway toward ecological awareness may be through the aesthetic or artistic. Capra
(2005) argues that art is crucial to understanding the nature of pattern, which is essential to
living systems,

Because the study of patterns requires visualizing and mapping, every time that
the study of pattern has been in the forefront, artists have contributed
significantly to the advancement of science…there’s hardly anything more
effective for developing and refining a child’s natural ability to recognize and
express patterns. (p. 22)
Researchers such as Flowers, et al. (2014), Gersie, et al. (2014), Jorgenson (2011), Michael
(1995), and Reed (2015), all prescribe the use of creative arts to enhance nature experiences,
or to move individuals closer to ecological awareness. Gersie, et al. (2014) discuss practices
of oral storytelling in social settings to promote empathy and ecological transformations.
Flowers, et al.’s (2005) empirical research explores animistic sentiments in response to art in
interaction with a tree, and Reed’s (2015) empirical study involves mask-making with a
group of retired professors to bring participants into deep reflection on their ecological
nature. Michael’s (1995) description of a project using poetry to explore children’s
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experiences in nature and Jorgenson’s (2011) call for poetry to explore teachers’ experience
of grief, make use of language aesthetically, sensually, and emotionally. These various
emprical and theoretical studies acknowledge the important role of the arts in developing
ecological awareness, supporting the aesethic use of art as another pathway to developing
ecological awareness.

2.4.3 Intellectual pathways: science, ecology, and educational experiences

Direct nature experiences compel sensory and emotional reactions, but these might also be
heightened by educational and intellectual experience, leading to deeper ecological
awareness. The intellectual way of knowing is therefore a second suggested pathway toward
ecological awareness. Capra (2005), Macy and Johnstone (2012), and Orr (2004) have
identified shifts in systems thinking which foster development towards ecological awareness.
Learning to think in systems involves developing an understanding of interactions,
interdependence, and mutuality, as well as a perception of cycles, flow, and relationship.
Capra (2005) calls for the study of ecological literacy through principles which infuse “a new
way of seeing the world and of thinking” (p. 20), as we come to understand the
interconnectedness we share with all life. Orr (2004) encourages us to “question the model of
pre-ecological intelligence and encourage students to think the matter out for themselves” (p.
52). Although an intellectual study of ecology and whole systems thinking may enhance
ecological awareness, it is my thinking that instruction alone will only result in a type of
clinical ‘knowing’ that will remain divorced from nature unless it is preceded by, or perhaps
accompanied by emotion and sensation. Indeed, Harding’s (2016) story of the young Aldo
Leopold depicts a well- trained and knowledgeable forester, acting out of his training but not
fully ‘getting’ the interconnectedness of all life until he has his emotional and deeply
intuitional experience. In Leopold’s case, he thought he knew what was right for the forest
until he had an intuitional experience that revealed to him how the mountain thought about
that. Thus, education alone may not be enough to make the shift to ecological awareness,
although it can enhance the understanding of emotional and sensational experiences.

2.4.4 Existential pathways: intuition, encounter, and transformation

The third way of knowing described by Harding (2016) involves a contemplative method of
engaging one’s senses and imagination with an intuitive approach to perceiving the natural
world and coming to an intuitional understanding, as when Leopold intuited the wolf telling

23
him his (the wolf’s) death was wrong for the entire mountain. In a discussion of deep
ecology, Harding (n.d.) further explains that a person uses these ways of knowing to access
deeper identification with non-human life, so that,

A key aspect of these experiences is the perception of gestalts, or networks of relationships. We

see that there are no isolated objects, but that objects are nodes in a vast web of relationships.
When such deep experience occurs, we feel a strong sense of wide identification with what we
are sensing. This identification involves a heightened sense of empathy and an expansion of
our concern with non-human life. We realise how dependent we are on the well-being of nature
for our own physical and psychological well-being. (Harding n.d., para. 9)
An alternative approach to developing a profound transformation in awareness is described
by Macy and Johnstone (2012), who call this shift in perception seeing with new eyes. Macy
and Johnstone (2012) call for a communal approach to the acknowledgement and exploration
of grief in response to the knowledge of threats to the natural world, in order to initiate this
change in our understanding of our interconnectedness with the rest of the non-human world.
They maintain that this must happen in community in order to support the emotional
response, whereas in all of the Harding’s (2016) stories the encounter or knowing takes place
alone. Likewise, Macy and Johnstone’s (2012) method of promoting seeing with new eyes, or
perception shift, does not necessarily call for an experience in nature, but rather relies on
emotional responses to intellectual knowledge about species extinction, habitat destruction,
or other ecological crises together with visualization, contemplation and community-based
ritualistic interactions.

These two different approaches to realizing an intuitional or existential profound shift in

perception pose questions about what types of experiences are most instrumental in
developing ecological awareness. On the one hand, in Harding’s thinking, they are linked to
nature and sensual experience. On the other, in Macy and Johnstone’s (2012) view, they are a
result of communal exploration of feeling (grief) in response to fully acknowledging what we
already know intellectually. If both of these are true, then an intuitional or existential
experience might originate either from sensual/nature experiences or from
community/emotional and intellectual experiences translated through contemplation. These
different approaches also introduce another dimension, that is, social influences, to the
discussion of ecological awareness development. In the theoretical literature, I have
identified three qualities of social engagement as community, guidance or solitude as modes
of interactions that may provide pathways to one’s connectedness to the natural world.

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2.4.5 Social (or non-social) pathways toward ecological awareness.

Communal experience

Macy and Johnstone’s (2012) emphasis on community is echoed in an autobiographic

narrative description of ecological awareness development related by Rosekrans (2017).
Over many years, from pre-college to post masters, Rosekrans’s personal narrative
substantiates many of the assertions made by researchers, while also emphasizing some
experiences over others. A key experience in his life was a college course in indigenous
studies that also included an experiential component- here he was exposed to intellectual
study alongside outdoor experience, ritual, and stories, in a community setting. The sense of
community together with the “meaning and reverence” (Rosekrans, 2017, p. 6) that imbued
everything they did was for him a key to this first transformative experience. This importance
of community is also echoed in Reed’s (2015) work with retired university educators, making
masks together while engaged in dialogue on identity. Both Reed’s (2015) work and
Rosekrans’ (2017) experience suggest that in addition to experiential, intellectual and
intuitional pathways, community might be a powerful pathway toward ecological awareness.

Guided experiences

Louv (2006), Orr (2004), and Young, et al. (2010), all advocate guiding or mentoring of
young people by adults. Louv (2006) thinks access to free time in nature is paramount, but
acknowledges that “children do need mentors, of course” (p.151) and cites stories of
environmentalists who were mentored by relatives or other adults, as well as the story of a
mother who created games in the wild with her daughter to help her develop her sensual
connectedness to nature. The child, now grown, has developed values that include love of
nature. Her mother tells Louv, “These values are rooted deeply in those early years” (p. 77).
Orr (2004) includes guidance from adults as one of three requirements for children to
develop biophilia, along with experiencing nature as benign from a young age, and having
access to natural places. He says,

I think we can safely surmise that biophilia, like the capacity to love, needs the
help and active participation of parents, grandparents, teachers and other caring
adults...the sense of biophilia needs instruction, example and validation by a
caring adult. (p.143)
Young, et. al. (2010) describe mentoring as an ancient tradition, a kind of “invisible
schooling” (p. 52) in nature. Although having a caring and ecological minded adult in

25
one’s early life is clearly important, I wonder if it is always essential, as other writers
such as Harding (2016) and Macy and Johnstone (2012) as well as the personal stories
of Rosekrans (2017) and White (2009), describe ways that adults might re-orient
themselves through reflection or encounter.

Experiences of solitude

Of particular interest are situations where ecological awareness is developed in solitude. Louv
(2006) gives a nod to the nourishing impact of solitude in a discussion of how nature can offer
emotional benefits and being solo in nature can be nourishing (p. 51). Abram (2011) also
mentions solitude in his introduction, saying,

Some might claim that this is a book of solitudes. For I’ve chosen to concentrate
upon those moments in a day or life when one slips provisionally beneath the
societal surge of forces, those occasions, often unverbalized and hence
overlooked when one comes more directly into felt relation with the wider more-
than-human community of beings that surrounds and sustains the human hubbub.
(p. 9)
Solitude has the effect of allowing our senses to come into deeper attunement with the
natural world, so that White (2009) notes,

Being alone in the bush without human disturbance was critical for evoking eco-
consciousness for me. It allowed the physical and psychological space to more
fully engage nonhuman other and connect with a place and with myself/Self.
(p. 287)
Reviewing Harding’s (2016) examples of Jungian ways of knowing that lead to ecological
awareness, we can also see that solitude is inherent in the stories he relates. David Abram
(2011) relates many stories of solo experiences in communion with the more than human
world and in the story cited by Harding (2016) he is alone in the cave. Arne Næss spent long
amounts of time alone on his mountain and in Harding’s telling Lovelock puzzled out a great
deal of his Gaia theory alone. We cannot be sure how near Leopold’s companions were when
he had his intuitive experience with the wolf and the mountain, but at least his senses were
directed to the dying wolf and not toward others in Harding’s retelling of the story. The role
of solitude in developing ecological awareness is still somewhat unclear here, but should be
investigated more.

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2.5 Conceptual framework
The concepts underpinning this research will combine intellectual, experiential, intuitional,
and aesthetic pathways together with the concepts of social interaction that are either
communal, guided, or in solitude. All of these ways of knowing and interacting might be
instrumental in developing ecological awareness, and they may also overlap each other, so
that an intellectual experience might also be emotional, for example, or a sensual experience
might lead to intuition, or intuition to emotional expression, and so on. These may be
enhanced by a community, an experience in solitude, or a relationship with another as a
guide. What needs to be investigated is how these ways of knowing and social dimensions
interact and what might advance the development of ecological awareness through these
pathways.

2.6 Empirical research into developing teacher’s ecological

awareness and interaction in schools
Up to now the literature review has focused on primarily theoretical works and possible
pathways toward ecological awareness. In this next section, I explore qualitative research
into ecological awareness and the interaction of ecologically aware teachers in schools. In
developing these sources I was interested in confirming or challenging the theory and in the
actual lives and reflections of ecologically minded teachers. Accordingly, the research is
divided into studies of developing ecological awareness and studies of teachers’ reflections
on school.

2.6.1 Developing ecological awareness

A teacher of science himself, Goodwin (2016) researched the lives of prominent

environmentalist in order to inquire into how they developed their ecological awareness, and
in order to suggest changes in schools’ curriculum. He was interested in the formative events
and experiences that led to their ecological mindset, especially a world view that each of
them professed, that all things are connected and that humans are not separate from or more
special than, other life forms. Goodwin’s (2016) findings concluded that environmentalists
with a high degree of ecological awareness (what he terms ecological identity) have had
outdoor experiences, many of them free and unstructured, in their youth, that these develop
emotional connections. In addition to these experiences, the respondents all described
systemic and ecological thinking skills that enhanced their understanding of connectedness
27
and interdependence. The link between these is unclear, as Goodwin (2016) says, “The
ability to think ecologically has either caused these individuals to develop a belief that all
things are connected, or, conversely, it could be that intuiting this has propelled them to think
ecologically” (p. 289). In addition, Goodwin (2016) notes that all the respondents mentioned
a rich life of reading great literature, and of authors as mentors, surmising that this might also
have led to their philosophical thought and systemic thinking. Interestingly Howard (2012),
also mentions the role of literature, saying “We need help from outside, books and as well as
teachers, who live and model the value system being fostered, coming together to sustain and
support the other” (p. 5). Although his subjects, as prominent environmentalists, are not
teachers in schools per se, Goodwin (2016) makes connections to how teachers might
incorporate these findings in schools. His study is remarkable in that it demonstrates the
interaction of outdoor experience, emotions, a knowledge pathway both through study of
ecology and through literature, and also of authors as mentors, confirming several pathways
but also suggesting literature as influential.

Teachers developing ecological awareness.

I have focused on four studies that investigate teachers’ development of ecological awareness
through different qualitative and empirical methods including interviews, workshops,
surveys, narrative analysis and contemplation with journaling in response to physical
settings. These studies look at in-service training that explicitly covers theories of deep
ecology in an intellectual format, deliberate exposure to ‘encounter’ through community
based art, and discussion focusing on the emotional, i.e. grief and love, a walking curriculum
that aims to ignite sensory awareness leading to ecological identity, and teacher’s own stories
as narrative inquiry.

Raus’ (2018) dissertation discusses several empirical studies she conducts with pre-teacher
candidates. One is a survey performed before and after in-service training in a teacher
education course that explicitly introduced student teachers to the concepts of deep ecology,
and also to exercises from the Work That Reconnects as designed by Macy and Johnstone
(2012). One hundred and seven teachers at the beginning of the course answered an open-
ended survey about their understanding of the term sustainable development; 88 percent
viewed this as a human focused development goal of resource use, environmental protection,
or reduction of consumption and only 11 percent viewed the current ecological crisis as one
of values or as a problem of separation from nature. By the end of the course, 77 respondents
28
answered a post-course questionnaire; this time 33.7 percent described sustainable
development in terms of the need to change to life affirming values and whole systems
thinking (Raus, 2018). Although it is difficult to point to direct causation from either the deep
ecology instruction or the Work That Reconnects activities, there is a significant growth in
values that support ecological awareness, and specifically that “everything is connected”
(Raus, 2018, p. 90). This study suggests that building knowledge as a pathway, as well as
engaging in the type of community-based reflections promoted by Macy and Johnstone
(2012) can result in developing ecological awareness.

Reed’s (2015) study explores the question of teaching, asking “What does it mean to educate
in a time of mass extinction?” (p. 21). She creates an encounter with elder educators that
explores the liminal and imaginal spaces of grief and community through open dialogue, art
making, and storytelling, in an effort to move beyond the appropriate into inappropriate or
unconventional responses to what it means to be human. She concludes that encouraging the
development of teacher ecological identity is possible through the deliberate exposure to
encounter; this, she believes, must also be in tandem with a process of grief and love, along
the lines of Macy and Johnstone’s (2012) work. Reed’s (2015) qualitative and interactional
research supports Harding’s (2016) theoretical discussion of intuition and encounter, albeit in
an artistic, rather than natural setting, setting the concept of intuitional ways of knowing in
the aesthetic.

Gray and Collucci-Gray (2019) employ a walking practice while applying exercises in
sensory awareness in an empirical study of undergraduate student teachers’ development of
themselves as part of the natural ecosystem. Students were asked to become aware of their
daily walk to campus and to write notes in a journal. The researchers aimed to activate and
integrate experiential, reflective, and intellectual ways of knowing, and found that some of
the most salient responses recorded in the fora students were writing in, were aesthetic
perceptions. Emotions and sensations that were also recorded by the participants. Students
also wrote about realizations and awakenings to do with shifting perceptions as they became
aware of their bodies in space and time, thus providing empirical support for the
development of deeper awareness of one’s part of the ecosystem through several ways of
knowing in a relatively small timeframe and in one’s daily experience.

Another empirical study by Adden (2016) researched teachers’ identity development as a

result of participation in the California Naturalists Program. In a narrative research approach,
29
Adden (2016) elicited the stories of 7 teachers in order to determine how participation in the
program had affected their identity construction and their teaching. Adden (2016) found that
the community aspect of the program played a significant role in these teachers’ views of
their ecological awareness, as did guidance from experts and being in contact with nature
while intentionally being more observant. However, instead of discovering the nature
program was the instigator of teachers’ nature connectedness, Adden (2016) found that it “is
more a reflection of their long-time personal connections to the natural world” (p. 92).

These four studies are interesting because they incorporate the conceptual pathways I am
employing as well as community interaction on several different levels and all report positive
enhancement of ecological awareness. This also reinforces through qualitative and empirical
research that intellectual, experiential and existential pathways can be employed in teachers’
development of ecological awareness and that the aesthetic is also instrumental. Adden’s
(2016) study, however, also indicates that nature connection over a long period of time,
rather than in separate short programs or practices, may be important to the development of
ecological awareness.

2.6.2 Working in schools

Teachers who recognize the need for shifts in ecological awareness, or who have experienced
a deeper ecological awareness, might still struggle with how to incorporate this into their
teaching in schools. Wright (2013) interviewed teachers in five alternative schools in Canada,
the US, and Australia about their teaching practice, reflections on characteristics that
facilitate such practices, and responsibilities of schools and teachers to foster ecological
understanding. The interviews in this study explored the meaning of a quote from Gregory
Bateson on patterns and connectedness:

The pattern which connects: Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern
which connects? . . . What’s wrong with them? What pattern connects the crab to
the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to
you? And all six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward
schizophrenic in another? (Bateson, 1979, p.8, as cited in Wright, 2013, p. 7)
Although teachers in the study acknowledged that this way of teaching is “an
existential need” (Wright, 2013, p. 7), they questioned how one might actually teach
that way with a “structure in place that does not honor the ecological principle” (p. 7)
as well as feeling that it was difficult to engage students. Some of the teachers reflected

30
on whether or not it was the purvey of schools to teach this mindset, or whether they
had the preparation or training to do so. Nevertheless, teachers in the study also opened
up when talking about their attempts and were animated in describing their own
teaching methods. These teacher reflections echo the views of Goodwin (2016),
Hadzigeorgiou & Skoumios (2013), Howard (2012) and Jorgenson (2011), that
teachers need to develop new values of an ecological mindset or paradigm while
working in institutions with structures with anthropocentric values. At the same time
the study reinforce the idea that, as Raus (2018) concludes, teachers can alone, working
individually within their classes, can make some changes in their own teaching that
make them, in Jorgenson (2011)’s words, “fruiting bodies of dissent” (p. 11).

Another way that teachers may approach the issue of merging their ecological awareness
with their teaching is through what Moroye (2009) terms the complementary curriculum. In
her study, Moroye interviews ecologically minded teachers of English and Social Studies to
see how their views emerge in “embedded and often unconscious expression” (page 4) as
they discuss larger themes of empathy and identity, integrity, responsibility, and connections
in their teaching. These teachers are often open about their own ecological thinking and
praxis but avoid preaching in order to allow for students’ reflections. The study highlights the
importance of teachers developing, and becoming aware of, their own identity and integrity
and the role that their own strong beliefs can have in shaping the values of their students, as
they can often serve even unconsciously as role models.

However, teachers’ roles and their identity as environmentalists can also create internal
conflict, as reviewed by Sarikaya and Sarac (2018) and Hwang (2008). Sarikaya and
Sarac’s (2018) review of pre-teachers’ attitudes discusses managing multiple roles-
something that may influence the extent to which even a teacher with a strong
ecological awareness may operate differently in her or his role as a teacher, especially
given that the role is encapsulated in a culture that does not encourage it. Hwang’s
(2008) small but thorough study of teachers’ curriculum narratives in Korea also
highlighted the difficulties of negotiating the needs of the curriculum with teachers’
individual environmental awareness. The study highlights the dichotomy between the
role of teachers in schools, and the teachers’ ecological awareness, as they try to
balance the requirements of curriculum with their vision of what it means to be a good
teacher. In this study, one salient finding was the extent to which teacher community

31
might affect teachers’ reflection and subsequent roles; those teachers with strong
cohorts of environmentally minded colleagues reported being more comfortable with a
role that challenged the more established curricula. Hwang (2008) concludes by
acknowledging that although individual teachers act as a force to introduce
environmental teaching in schools, and, “teachers’ grass root efforts and action should
receive policy and institutional support” (p. 287), the agency for environmental
education needs to move from individual teachers to the educational institutions.

These studies highlight the importance of ascertaining which circumstances in schools

make working with ecological awareness more difficult, and what types of
circumstances might support ecologically minded teachers in their schools.

2.7 Conclusion
All of these studies, both theoretical and empirical, indicate various pathways toward
developing or awakening teacher’s ecological awareness. A qualitative study that
investigates the lived experiences of teachers with well-developed ecological awareness and
also illuminates their reflections on teaching in schools, can add to the discourse by seeking
confirmation or revealing challenges to the theories, and by furthering the conversation
around how teachers can both develop ecological awareness and share that in school settings.
Rosekrans’(2017) narration of his own journey and White’s (2009) phenomenological
exploration also suggest that teachers’ personal stories can offer us valuable information
about how their ecological awareness developed.

In the next sections of the thesis I will therefore develop a methodology for gathering and
interpreting narratives of teacher’s personal journeys toward ecological awareness and their
reflections on the ways in which they incorporate this into their identities and roles as
teachers.

32
Chapter 3 Design, methodology and methods

3.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will describe the methodology and design of this narrative research project,
and explain how a combination of thematic analysis, together with an embrace of
interpretative inquiry, creates a fuller holistic understanding of teachers’ stories of ecological
awareness and thus answers the research question more completely. In the following sections
I will present my epistemological stance, my methodological approaches, my research design
and methods, choice of participants, quality assurance and ethical considerations of the study.

3.2 Epistemology

3.2.1 Interpretivism

My epistemological stance is interpretivism; that is, a view that data, or even reality, can
never be fully objective- meaning is interpreted in context, across time and between
conversants (Moss, 1996). In narrative forms, this means that events are interpreted at many
levels and at many times, first by the observer or participant at the moment, then through
their subsequent recalling and retelling of events through time, as well as by the listeners to
the stories.

3.2.2 Beyond human language

I also subscribe to a stance that language is an expressive phenomenon shared throughout the
natural human and more than human world, as described by Abram (2011). In the
biographies and stories told by my participants, they speak of listening to birds and other
animals as well as natural phenomena, of the expressive power of mountains and the
sensuous expression of wind, soil, stars and sea. I have remained open to the understanding
that, as Abram (2011) says, stories learned in nature, of nature, and told orally, “allow the
things and beings of the world to shine through the skein of terms and to touch us more
directly” (p. 265), and then in explanation,

For here, everything is expressive, a thunderstorm no less than a hummingbird.

To the animistic, oral sensibility, a cedar tree’s hushed and whispered phrasings
may be as eloquent as a spider’s fine spun patternings, or the collective
polyphony of a pack of wolves. (Abram, 2011, p. 265)

33
This stance has allowed me to embrace my informants’ interpretations of their experiences as
they have told them, and to interpret them likewise.

3.2.3 Story as a way of knowing

If we limit ourselves only to western science’s methods of analysis, we ignore a whole gamut
of ways of knowing and understanding the world and ourselves in it. We must embrace both
scientific and intuitive modes since,

Explanation is rational; understanding is intuitive. Reconnecting these two

severed branches of our psyche is a vitally important task if we are to respond
appropriately to the vast ecological crisis that our culture has unleased upon the
world. (Harding, 2016, p.20).
The telling of stories as a way of knowing is supported by studies of non-literate story telling
traditions. (Abram, 2011; Piquemal, 2003). The storytelling tradition in non-literate societies
was a way of transferring understandings about worldview and about the place itself (Abram,
2010). There might include teachings in a story, but these were not didactic in the western
sense, and left understandings to be discovered by the listener (Piquemal, 2003). Piquemal
argues that the moralistic elements in some indigenous stories were added after
colonialization. Additionally, Abram (2011) posits, rather than the conflict/climax/resolution
structure of western traditions, oral grounded-in-nature stories are holistic, not linear but
circular in time, and reveal a participation between human and more-than-human subjects in
the story. Piquemal uses the term traditional orality consciousness (Piquemal, 2003
referencing personal communication with Allen, 1998) and distinguishes between this and
Western modes of discourse, saying, “Western literacy consciousness usually requires an
analysis and deconstruction of texts, whereas orality consciousness implies that meanings
arise from the story as a whole in a holistic context (Piquemal, 2003, p. 115). Story as a way
of knowing may also extend to a way of viewing narrative research, as Kim (2016) says, we
tell the stories and “the stories tell us” (p.7).

3.2.4 Ecologies of knowledge

I posit that these two modes, analytical and the more-than-analytical ways of knowing, can,
and must co-exist, each offering something to understanding that the other cannot. In this, I
subscribe to De Sousa Santos’ (2016) ecologies of knowledge, and his statement that “The
ecology of knowledges assumes that all relational practices involving human beings and
human beings and nature entail more than one kind of knowledge” (p. 297). Non-analytical
34
ways of knowing, here embodied in oral narrative or traditional orality consciousness
(Piquemal, 2003), can be a partner in the search for understanding, as De Sousa Santos
(2016) says, “What each knowledge contributes to such a dialogue is the way in which it
leads a certain practice to overcome a certain ignorance” (p. 296). In this study, I use
knowledge from data analysis to support findings of how teacher participants have developed
ecological awareness, while the end stage of the analysis employs an arts-based fictional
narrative. I will describe below how this follows naturally from the use of an analytical
interpretive method described by Blom and Nygren (2010) together with narrative
approaches described by Clandinin (2007), Kim (2016), and Leavy, (2016).

3.3 Narrative approach with interpretive analysis.

A narrative approach to research can include both the analysis of narrative, or narrative as
data, and the analysis by narrative, or narrative as product. (Clandinin, 2007; Kim, 2016)
Analysis of narrative refers to conventional forms of identifying codes and themes through
the data, which is the narrative or the interview. Analysis by narrative, on the other hand,
refers to using a narrative form in order to interpret the data, where “The research aim is to
organize the data to create a narrative with a plot that unifies the data. The created story is a
narrated explanation of the phenomenon being studied.” (Clandinin, 2007, p. xv)

Kim (2016) refers to McCormack (2004), Mishler (1995), and Polkinghorne (1988) to
consolidate a framework that offers a final product of narrative inquiry that is a restorying
itself. In a diagrammatic explanation of how to use this framework (Kim, 2016) lists creative
nonfiction including short story, fiction novel, poetry, and drama as options for the final
product in narrative inquiry and also explains, “Polkinghorne, Mishler, and Labov allow us to
let stories be told in different narrative genres through the methods of narrative analysis” (p.
204).

In a discussion of fiction as research practice, Leavy, (2016) describes a history of interplay

between fiction and research, pointing out that fiction writers also heavily research their
subjects and histories, and that there is a link between qualitative research and arts-based
fiction as research in that each strives for an exacting verisimilitude. Leavy (2016) describes
how both narrative and qualitative research “aims at generating deep understanding,
unpacking meanings, revealing social processes, and above all, illuminating human

35
experience”(p. 15) in ways that “values sensory knowledge and experience, multiple
meanings, and subjectivity in the research process” (Leavy, 2016, p. 15).

I realized while working with the research data, and using an interpretive thematic analysis
method described by Blom and Nygren (2010), that understandings which were developing
in the comprehension stage of the Blom and Nygren (2010) model provided not only themes
for analysis but also led to the final stage they term appropriation, which they base on
Ricoeur (1976, 1981) but with their own interpretation as the end point of analysis. Blom and
Nygren (2010) assert that the difference between comprehension and appropriation is that in
appropriation the reader (or hearer, as I see it) will “make it one’s own, become changed, and
discover new possibilities” (p.32). Appropriation is an end result of deep engagement with
comprehension and adds a fuller interpretive dimension, as they explain,

It is possible to fit the parts of a puzzle correctly (which is analogue to

comprehension) without understanding what the motif of the puzzle means in a
deeper sense (analogue to appropriation)…something that we regard as the solely
cognitive (but sometimes also emotional) end product of the analysis…In the
way we understand this process, future possibilities only emerge when someone
has absorbed the comprehension and has become affected by it cognitively and
often emotionally. (Blom & Nygren, 2010, p.32)

As I reached the appropriation stage of my data analysis and engaged both cognitively and
emotionally with my participants’ stories, I began to move into an interpretive stage that
made it possible to extend the analysis into analysis by narrative. I began to imagine small,
fictionalized stories out of the biographies and interviews of the participants and as a result of
my thematic work with them, and I realized they were in fact both a form of appropriation
and a form of analysis that revealed the genuine sensual and emotional human experience,
and deep holistic understandings, described by Leavy (2016). Thus these fictionalized stories
are both a form of appropriation (Blom & Nygren, 2010) and of Kim’s (2016) analysis by
narrative. In addition, I began to try to consciously form the developing stories according to
Abram’s (2011) and Piquemal’s (2003) description of traditional oral story design. This also
reflects De Sousa Santos’ (2016) call for ecology of knowledges; in this case with the
merging of analytical and non-analytical methods and the introduction of story in a
traditional form. In the sections that follow I will go into more detail into both the data
collection methods I used and then revisit the data analysis methods in more detail before I
finish the chapter by discussing the quality and ethical considerations of the study.

36
3.4 Data collection methods

The design of the study is based in qualitative research and particularly narrative interpretive
methods. The primary methodology of the data collection is inspired by Wengraf’s (2001)
biographic narrative interpretive method, which includes a biographical sketch followed by
an in-person semi-structured interview. Additionally, I have used the New Ecological
Paradigm (Dunlap, et al., 2000) survey to collect data on participants worldviews, as a tool
for discussing participants’ ecological stances in the qualitative interviews. (Please see
appendix 1 for the full NEP survey.)

In the process of collecting my data, I first wrote an interview guide (app. 2) based on the
concepts I had identified from the literature review as well as from various measures of
ecological awareness, described in more detail in the sections that follow. I went through a
rather continual process of identifying subjects for the study, from September to November,
and sent potential participants a request for participation (app. 3) together with a consent
form (app. 4), should they agree to be a part of the study. I sent instructions for the New
Ecological Paradigm (NEP) survey along with a request for the written biographical sketch
(app. 5), again, asking teachers to complete this if they agreed to participate. I scheduled
dates for in-person interviews, and performed and recorded these. For each subject I thus
had, together with the permission form, a written biographical sketch, the NEP survey, and
an interview of approximately one hour transcribed in detail, as data for analysis. Here I will
provide more detail on each of these and the methods I used.

3.4.1 Biographic narrative interpretive method

Wengraf’s (2001) biographic narrative interpretive method calls for narrative information
gathered in two or three sessions, described by Earthy and Cronin (2008); first a free
narration of biography, then the solicitation of PINs (Particular Incidental Narratives) and
finally a semi-structured interview with direct questions posed by the interviewer. Wengraf
(2008) himself has encouraged adaptation of his method, as he says, the method “was only
launched some seven years ago as an adoptable (and adaptable!) research practice in its
present form with the publication of a textbook” (p. 1).

My adaptation of the method substituted the first interview with a written biological narrative
and followed up with an in-person semi-structured interview that included both the expansion
of the biography through the PIN method (Wengraf 2001) and direct questioning in a semi-

37
structured interview. The written biography asked participants to submit a 1-2-page
‘biographical sketch’ of their life with reference to ecological awareness in response to my
prompt:

Please write a biographical sketch of your life, approximately one to two pages,
with an emphasis on the development of your ecological awareness. You may
consider your own identity, background, situations, moments, events, places, or
people or other creatures who have contributed to the development of your
ecological awareness as you grew up and until now. (from the instructions for
the biographical sketch, app. 5.)
Although perhaps not as ‘free’ as Wengraf’s (2001) method, since the topic was proposed
and a suggested length was given, the written narrative gathered data on both the historical
background and on self-chosen aspects of the subject’s life. I felt the benefit of providing a
chance to narrate in writing without interaction from the interviewer overrode the possible
constraint of writing in this first phase. This biographical sketch provided a narrative through
time and served as the basis for extracting particular incidents and eliciting specific stories in
the one-to-one interviews. It also gave insights into participants’ values and world views.

3.4.2 New ecological paradigm survey

I was concerned with understanding participants’ world views in order to independently

ascertain that they had the ecological awareness that I had assumed when I asked them to
participate. Thus, in addition to the biographical sketch, I asked them to send their responses
to a quick survey of ecological awareness, the New Ecological Paradigm survey (Dunlap, et
al. 2000). My intention with the survey was to gain an understanding of the participant’s
reflection on their own ecological stance. The survey answers were used in the first part of
the subsequent semi-structured interviews to provide a basis for discussion and reflection on
this.

The revised New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) (Dunlap, et al., 2000) was published as a
revision to the original New Environmental Paradigm Scale, which debuted in 1978 and was
widely used in the decades following. The NEP provides 15 questions with a scale of
response from 1 to 5. The statements in the survey alternate between those representing what
Dunlap et al. (2000) refer to as the dominant social paradigm and the new ecological
paradigm (Dunlap, et al., 2000). The NEP has been used in a myriad of ecological studies
and Dunlap et al. (2000) state that internal consistency as well as reliability is high although

38
there is criticism that it does not measure some deep ecological values (Lundmark, 2007).
(Please see appendix 6 for a copy of the deep ecology principles.)

3.4.3 Semi-structured interviews

I chose to use semi-structured interviews because this is part of Wengraf’s (2001) method,
and also because I felt they would both allow for participants to speak freely and ensure
continuity and comparability across the interviews. In Wengraf’s (2001) method, the
interviews are used to pull out the Particular Narrative Incidences (PINS) that are identified
through the earlier communication, in this case through the written biographies. The semi-
structured interviews had three sections, focusing on the attitude and ecological world view
of the participants, their stories of ecological development, and their reflections on how this
affects them as teachers. In the interviews, I first engaged in some general conversation to
make us both at ease. As we started the interview, I first described the study and made sure to
advise the subject on anonymity. I explained the various sections of the interview and asked
if there were questions. I attempted to conduct each interview in a style which would allow
participants to say as much as they liked and to question or comment as they saw fit.
Although I had the interview guide I did not use all of the questions if a subject’s answer had
already addressed it elsewhere.

The first interview questions focused on the participants’ reflections on their own ecological
awareness. To improve on gaps regarding deep ecology ethics perceived in the NEP
(Lundmark, 2007) I included two questions modelled on the deep ecology principles (Næss,
2016). I also included two questions based on other scales; the Nature Connectedness Scale
(Mayer & McPherson, 2004) and the Inclusion of Nature in Self Scale (Martin & Czellar,
2016), (appendix 7) in order to fully understand each subject’s current attitudes and world-
views. Even though these scales are quantitative, my goal in using them was not to ‘assess’
them quantitatively but to use them as aids to reflection and discourse. The participants and I
went over their survey answers collaboratively; they could elaborate on each question if they
liked, and I would pick out some, perhaps because one answer seemed to contradict another,
or because the subject had answered it rather equivocally, by choosing to rate it ‘3’ out of the
‘5’ possible ranking. Here, I was interested in their own reflections for their choices.

The second section of the interview focused on the biographies and enhanced the subjects’
personal history and Particular Incident Narratives or PINs (Wengraf, 2001). Here I
attempted to draw out fuller stories relating to the particular incidences the subjects had
39
chosen to mention in their biographies. These were as varied as childhood memories and
activities, interactions with other significant persons in their lives and in nature; jobs,
education and training; treks, hikes and travels; or sudden insights or realizations- these also
often in nature. In each case the impetus came from the mention of the event by the
participant themselves, although I drew out more story elements by asking specific questions
about time and place, sensory elements such as how they felt, what they saw, heard and so
on, and prompts for more detail.

In the last section of the interviews I asked for reflections on how participants have changed
in response to developing these new concepts. However, I often discovered that they had held
their ecological views from before they were teachers. I asked them to reflect on the ways
their ecological views affected their interactions in school, including teaching or interacting
with students or colleagues, and about any conflicts that arose as a result of their views being
different from the standard social paradigm. I ended each interview by asking each
participant for their own reflection on how students might develop ecological awareness, thus
circling back to the original investigation of developing ecological awareness in schools.

3.5 Data analysis

3.5.1 Procedure

When I received the biographical sketches I first allowed for a naïve reading. I then re-read
them to look for events and experiences that might be developed as PIN (Particular Incidental
Narratives). Before the interviews I also went over the participants’ answers on the New
Ecological Paradigm scale carefully and made notes of which answers were interesting to
develop further. I then used the model by Blom and Nygren (2010) for the thematic analysis.
Although Wengraf (2008) recommends his own analysis method, he ensures the reader that
his method

provides rich material for any method of narrative interpretation. There are many
methods of interpreting narrative material: the BNIM procedures are just one. It
is perfectly possible for you to generate material by way of the BNIM interview,
but then decide to use a non-BNIM way of interpreting some or all of that
material. (Wengraf, 2008, p. 4)
I listened to each interview many times, making a habit to listen first thing in the morning
and late at night- this allowed for many thoughts to develop over the course of the day, or
sometimes, even overnight. After I had listened several times, I transcribed each interview
40
manually, and included all the language, noting pauses with ‘…’ and including notes on
laughter or other utterances, with an understanding that these might also be clues to the
subject’s attitudes toward what they were saying. I worked on the transcriptions several times
from about November through February, checking and rechecking for accuracy. Both as I
transcribed, and again re-listening and re-reading afterwards, I began to develop the codes
that presented themselves from the biographies and the interviews.

3.5.2 Thematic analysis

I based my coding on model 1 described by Blom and Nygren (2010), but changed the
thematic categories for the structural analysis from what codes, who/where/why codes and
reflective codes (Blom & Nygren, 2010) to what/where codes, how codes, and who codes. I
changed the codes because my research focuses on how teachers develop ecological
awareness, so the how was particularly important to me, and I was also looking for what
might match the pathways I had identified. In addition, I was interested in ascertaining what
types of social interactions might enhance ecological awareness, and so the who codes were
important. In the end my analysis process and coding structure, based on Blom and Nygren
(2010) and adapted to my research is as follows in the diagram below.

1. Naive 2. Structural 3.Comprehension 4. Appropriation

reading analysis Merging and analysis by
developing themes narrative (Kim,
What/ how who
2016)
where

Participant 1 individual Indiv. Indiv. Indiv. Individual story

Collective
Participant 2 individual Indiv. Indiv. Indiv. Individual story
thematic analysis

Participant 3 individual Indiv. Indiv. Indiv. Individual story

(and so on
through
participant 8)

Table 3.5.2: thematic analysis

(For an example of the use of this model with participant data, please see appendix 8).
41
As I began to look back through the individual analysis for commonalities between them, this
enhanced my understanding and led to themes. I carefully considered which themes were
most important, aiming for a consolidation that did not marginalize the experiences of any
particular participant, as I reflected in my research journal,

How is my thematic coding true to the experience of the participants? I must

necessarily leave things out- things that are sometimes very dear to the
participants telling them. Is coding a kind of averaging, that minimizes outliers?
... The premise of much of the thesis is how we develop ecological
awareness. That is a ‘we’, and thus a distillation in itself. It’s important that we
recognize outliers in every situation, but there should also be some conclusions
that can forward theory, and theory is based on generalities…The point is to do
that while also leaving the work open to the edges. (12.13.2020) (please see
appendix 9.)
I performed the thematic analysis in an iterative process that also began to include the
development of the analysis by narrative as the coding and themes became clearer and my
comprehension developed. When I had a final version of the transcripts I sent them to the
participants, letting them know that they could contact me with any concerns they had, and
did not receive any concerns.

As I had divided the interviews into three sections; philosophical stance, stories from PINs
(Particular Incidental Narratives) followed by questions about ecological awareness, and then
reflections on teaching and life in schools, I then also analyzed each section of the interviews
separately. Although I used Blom and Nygren (2010) for the biographies and narrative
sections of the interviews, for the sections on philosophical stance I simply collated the
various comments and consolidated them. For the section on reflections on teaching and
schools, I did a quick hand-written coding based on the structural element what and on
reflective codes (Blom & Nygren, 2020) to identify the major events and the participant’s
affective reactions.

The major themes that came out of New Ecological Paradigm scale and other measurements
were the fluctuating nature of nature connectedness, the role and definition of humans,
concepts of modifying or interfering with nature, and questions regarding equating Earth
with a spaceship. Main themes arising from the biographical sketches and stories of
participants (particular narrative incidents) included access to nature, timelessness and
freedom, guidance with mentors (including casual mentors), profound experiences in
isolation, community and education. Themes around interactions in schools included
instances of ecologically aware teaching experiences, but at the same time hypocrisy,
42
rigidity, and over scheduling of time with lack of outdoor time as well as need for activism.
Affective responses included frustration, dread, urgency regarding climate change and fear
for children’s future as well as, in other participants, satisfaction, collegiality, and autonomy.
I will address all of these in depth in the findings section. An overall graphic of my research
design including data collection and analysis is:

Research Process

Researcher Participants Collaborative

1. Researcher sets criteria for particants and contacts potential participants

2. Participants
Write biographical sketches (Wengraf, 2008)
Complete NEP survey (Dunlap, et al., 2000)
Return Permission forms

3. Researcher
Performs naïve reading (Blom & Nygren, 2010)
Looks for Particular Incidental Narratives-PINs (Wengraf, 2008)

.
4. Researcher conducts semi-structured interviews and participants
Discuss ecological views according to the NEP (Dunlap, et al., 2000)
Share incidental narratives in response to PIN prompts (Wengraf, 2008)
Reflect on the impact of their ecological awarness on interactions in schools.
Reflect on how schools might improve sustainable education

5. Researcher listens to transcripts and transcribes them.

6. Researcher performs thematic analysis (Bloom & Nygren, 2010) including

Naïve Listening and Structural analysis Comprehension Appropriation

Reading When/where how who Development of Analysis by Narrative
themes (Kim, 2016)

7. Transcripts sent to particpants for review and possible reponse

8. Findings presented as
Narrative analysis (Blom & Nygren, 2010; Kim, 2016)
Analysis by narrative (Kim, 2016)

.
Figure 3.5.2: Research process

43
3.6 Sampling of participants
I chose to develop the sampling through reference, or snowballing, because of the narrow
criteria I had for participants, that they be teachers in primary through secondary schools, that
they were located in Norway, that they speak English, and that they profess a development of
ecological awareness. I spoke with colleagues at my school and at schools where I knew
teachers, as well as with acquaintances who I had met through environmental groups and
activities. In this way I eventually identified 13 prospective candidates. Of those, I sent out
requests for participation to twelve, with the project description, instructions for the
biographical sketch and the NEP, and the consent form. I received positive responses from
all of them, although one subsequently could not meet at the time I was in their part of the
country. Two interviews were set up and abandoned when Norway restricted travel and non-
essential meetings. At that time I also decided not to send out further information to the 12th
candidate, and not to follow up on the 13th suggestion. Both seemed like excellent candidates,
yet the ethics of following the country’s covid restrictions outweighed, for me, the chance to
meet more participants.

I interviewed eight candidates in person. Two of those had not sent in the written biography
before the interview date, and in these cases, we agreed they would provide an oral
biographical sketch in person before the semi-structured interviews. Although these two
biographies were different in their collection, they still allowed for collection of data on both
the biographical background of the candidate, recorded without any comment or interference
from the interviewer, and through a semi-structured interview with specific interview
questions (the same as in all other interviews). For this reason, I concluded that they also fit
the interview design protocol for a two part data collection structure with and without
interviewer interaction and could thus be included in the data.

Kim (2016) discusses the number of participants that should be included in narrative
interviews and recommends 15+/- 10, with the final number to be decided by the type and
depth of the narratives and by the concept of saturation. In my case the narrative biography
was not conceived as a full recount of every event in the participants’ lives, but as a sketch of
their ecological development through time, thus resulting in briefer narratives. I was looking
however, for as broad a range of experiences as I could find within the time constraints of the
project, as well as for a variety of types of schools, subjects taught, and ages and gender of
participants as part of my ‘saturation’ and thus settled on the eight participants.

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I had not spoken to the participants before the study in detail about their specific ecological
views, their personal histories, or their more detailed work in schools. However, I knew most
of them from contexts that were pro-environmental, and had had conversations with some of
them, which led me to evaluate them as ecologically aware and for some of them I knew of
some of their work as teachers. One participant had worked on a garden project with me, one
had attended a workshop I had led, one was a fellow student in a course we attended, and one
was suggested to me by some of my students. Another had helped to lead a workshop I had
attended; one was suggested by a friend of mine who is an activist, one I had met in a
permaculture convention, and the last had made contact with me after realizing we had
friends in common. Of these, two were from alternative (Steiner and Montessori) schools,
three from international schools, two from public schools, and one a teacher freelancing
across several public schools. Two were science teachers (one upper secondary and one
primary), two were contact teachers (one lower secondary and one primary), one an art
teacher, one a social studies teacher, one an environment teacher, and one an administrator
with a part time teaching load.

3.7 Quality considerations

Savin-Baden and Major (2013) cite Lincoln and Guba (1985) as the premier resource for
judging quality in research, listing credibility, confirmability, dependability, and
transferability as the four major criteria to meet. In this thesis, credibility, the notion that my
results should represent reality, is accomplished, I believe, by using a narrative method where
participants share their own stories, as Savin-Badin and Major (2013) say, “in the qualitative
researcher’s case, ‘reality’ is the participant’s reality”(p. 475). Dependability means that
findings will endure over time. I suggest that since the findings are related to human
connection to the natural world, the research is of a constant nature, as both human nature
and the natural world have enduring qualities. In addition, I think the criteria of dependability
is met by discussing the findings in relation to the literature, linking them to both new and
older theory and empirical findings through time.

Transferability, or application to similar situations, is not entirely possible with a narrative

approach, which is inherently personal. However, some measure of applicability is
accomplished by using a sample of teachers from several different type of schools,
socioeconomic backgrounds, nationalities and gender, teaching several subjects at different
educational levels from primary through secondary school. Lastly, the criterion of
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confirmability ensures that the researcher has remained neutral. I wonder if neutrality is ever
completely possible, since researchers like all people have their own stances. Nevertheless, I
think several strategies can add to trustworthiness, which for me must take into account both
Savin-Baden and Major’s (2013) description of “the position that we cannot separate
ourselves from what we know in our search for ‘objectivity’” (p. 470), and Kim’s (2016) call
for phronesis, or “the moral and ethical judgement to act wisely and prudently” (p. 105).
This type of trustworthiness includes self-awareness, ethical judgement, and care, lending
confirmability to the researcher’s findings. One way of achieving this trustworthiness is
aided is by providing member checking (Savin-Baden & Major, 2013), which I did by
sending my transcripts to the participants for their review. Both the verbatim nature of
narrative research and dense descriptions of both my methods and my findings, including a
large number of detailed quotations, also help to provide trustworthiness and hence
confirmability.

Triangulation and positionality

Another strategy that can strengthen trustworthiness is triangulation, which according to

Savin-Baden and Major (2010) is the combination of several methods, investigators, theories,
methods or data points such as time, space, or persons. In this research project I believe
triangulation exists in both the multiple methods used, the multiple schools represented, and
the number of participants.
Finally, I think the best way to maintain trustworthiness is with a clear positionality, by
declaring the positions I hold in my research. I have used a reflexive approach to my own
stances, that “suggests that, rather than trying to eliminate their effect, researchers should
acknowledge and disclose their selves in their work, aiming to understand their influence on
and in the research process” (Holmes, 2020, p. 3). I clarify my own positionality in the
introduction and throughout the study as epistemological stances, as approaches in methods
and as stances toward theory. I disclose my relationship to my participants in my comments
on my sampling, and again in discussing implications and recommendations of this research.
I acknowledge that in the study of ecological awareness I am an “insider” (Holmes, 2020, p.
6) and that this comes with both advantages in knowing the field and with disadvantages of
sympathies toward the ecological view, which I will attempt to declare throughout.

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3.8 Ethical Considerations

An interpretive narrative approach to research poses several ethical considerations. Life

stories are challenging because they can reveal detail that put identity at risk. Even latent
information might lead to what Karen Kaiser (2009) calls deductive disclosure (p.1635).
Norway is small and thus schools are more discoverable. For this reason, I instructed my
participants not to divulge any names of places, institutions, or third persons. In cases where
they inadvertently did so, I removed these from the transcript.

A narrative approach has its own ethical considerations, as Bloomberg and Volpe (2016)
articulate, “multiple issues arise in collecting, analyzing, and telling individual stories, not
least of all being how the researcher is positioned in the narrative.” (p. 51). Earthy and
Cronin (2008) assert that the theoretical paradigm of narrative analysis “enables the
researcher first of all to dismiss criteria for validity based on realist assumptions, and second,
to acknowledge that a different theoretical framework might produce a different analysis”
(p.17). The narrative format necessarily results in “an inherent reflexivity” (Earthy & Cronin,
2008, p. 17) between the researcher and the storyteller.

An interpretive approach also brings forth questions of reliability to the issue of ethics. The
data generated may not be generalized across large populations because it is influenced by
the personal values of the participants as well as by the researcher’s own interpretation.
Ethics is also a concept in narrative inquiry that extends to the relationship between
participants and researcher, and as Kim (2016) notes, there is a need for moral responsibility
that begins with the ethical relationship between the two persons, and that includes creating
safety, respect, dignity and welfare. Kim (2016) proposes a “narrative ethics in practice”
(Kim, 2016, p.104), with the development of ethical judgement, or phronesis, based in
reflexivity. She adds, “reflexive researchers do not merely report on the ‘facts’ of the
research but also take stock of their actions based on phronesis and their role in the research
process” (Kim, 2016, p.105). For me, this has meant that I ask myself why I think I know
what I know, how I think I know it, and reflect honestly on what else might be true. The use
of analysis by narrative also brings up ethical issues especially in regard to authorship and
ownership as well as of trustworthy interpretation. I sought to resolve this by staying close to
the stories of participants and endeavoring to reflect their emotional and affective responses,
especially referring back to the concept of the dignity and welfare of the participants.

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I kept a research journal sporadically from when I started to meet with and interview
participants. (see sample in appendix 7) and while I was interviewing. I took notes after
interviews as a first naïve understanding. Although I didn’t record in it consistently, I wrote
when I needed clarify my thoughts and reflect on the research process. I often considered
problems I was having expressing myself in writing, wondered what should be included or
not as I wrote my methods and my findings, and considered what were just and right actions.
In this way my reflections in the journal also include what Kim (2016) calls reflexivity with
regards to phronesis. When I began to write the thesis proper, I stopped writing in the journal
and would instead write notes to myself in the margins of my drafts; I wrote questions for
reflection and then deleted them as I resolved them to my satisfaction. I also took notes in
sessions with my supervisor, which I also went over in regard to my writing and judgements.

In the following chapters I will detail my findings and discuss them.

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Chapter 4: Findings

4.1 Introduction
In this study, eight teachers shared their reflections on the development of their ecological
awareness throughout their lives. The research questions “What are teachers’ narrated life
experiences regarding the development of their ecological awareness?”, “What are these
teacher’s reflections on how their ecological awareness influences their world view, ethics,
and interactions in schools?” and “How can these stories and reflections be described,
understood, and interpreted to improve educational practice, and especially education for
sustainability?”, has led me to collect data through narrative analysis methods. In collecting
and analyzing data to answer this question I have focused on three areas: Teacher’s
reflections on their ecological awareness, the development of that awareness through time as
told in their own biographical sketches and in particular incidental narratives elicited in
interviews, and their reflections on how the development of their ecological awareness has
impacted their interactions in schools, also elicited in the interviews.

Similarly, I chose to analyze the findings from the study on three levels. First, I analyzed the
paradigms through teachers’ reflections on measurement tools, both to summarize their
ecological stances, and to develop relevant threads of ecological awareness. I then coded the
interviews where we had discussed their personal incidental narratives and their pathways to
ecological awareness, developed themes, and engaged in comprehension, and appropriation
resulting in analysis by narrative. Lastly, I also summarized teacher reflections on the impact
of their ecological awareness on interactions in school settings.

Finally, I also present the findings in three stages as well. First, I present a short restoried
profile of each participant distilled from their own biographies and information told during
the interviews. I use tools of smoothing, paraphrase, and synthesis to create a temporal
narrative (Kim, 2016). Next, I offer an arts-based interpretive narrative as analysis by
narrative (Kim, 2016) highlighting the subjects intuitive, emotional, and sensual knowing
and experiencing of their ecological awareness. Finally, I move back into a traditionally
analytic mode, and present the thematic analysis of the participants’ ecological awareness,
pathways toward awareness, and their reflections on impact in school settings.

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4.2 Presentations
The individual profiles in this section are temporally ordered summary narratives of the
participants development of ecological awareness as written in their biographies and as told
in the subsequent interviews. The summary of events in the profile are “smoothed” (Kim,
2016) by conjoining the biographical details with additional accounts given during the
interviews in order to give one continuous history with causal and chronological links
(Creswell, 2007). The names and identifiable geographical data are changed, and gender may
be altered.

With each biographical entry I also include the interpretive narrative, the result of
appropriation, to bring to life the most poignant experiences narrated by the participants.
These are interpretive renditions blurring chronology and adding some fictional connecting
detail, based on the participant’s tellings and my appropriation of the comprehensions I
developed my thematic analysis. The two renditions, historical biographical data, and
interpretive analysis by narrative bring together multiple ways of knowing, and presenting,
the subjects of the study.

4.2.1. ‘Sarah’

Biographical Sketch

Sarah has been teaching for 15 years in primary and middle school. She feels her ecological
awareness comes primarily from her upbringing close to nature. In her descriptions of her
childhood, Sarah emphasizes the sensual involvement she had with the land. Her descriptions
are full of senses, especially smell, and she also has strong descriptions of relationships and
community. Growing up, Sarah had a strong relationship with the river near her house and at
their family’s shared holiday home in the mountains. In telling the story of her childhood, she
emphasizes family, freedom to roam, and the timelessness of her childhood. The schools
Sarah went to, and later the schools she taught at, had gardens and strong nature programs.
When she moved to a new country, she bought a house that was near a river so that her own
children could play and roam as she had when she was young. She continued to immerse
herself in nature by walking, hiking crafting and camping in nature. The move to the country
that she lives in now has brought challenges for her, both in terms of the differences in land
and climate and the school itself, where contact with nature is limited. The sense of

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community in the school where she now works is growing around the establishment of a
garden and is something she celebrates and looks forward to developing.

Interpretive narrative: Small One and the Mountain

Small One is alone, picking her way along the path in a fragrant pine forest. Her father and
siblings have gone on ahead, for they are faster than she is. She knows there is a long path
ahead of her, the steep slope of the mountain, but she is neither deterred nor afraid. At the top
of the mountain her father will take out the small portable stove he is carrying in his
backpack and will make tea, which will warm her, as it warmed her father when his father
made it for him, at the top of the mountain.

The chattering voices of her garrulous siblings fade as they and her father move on ahead.
Small One is quiet, enveloped in the sights, sounds and smells of the land around her. The
steady plod of her small shoes on fertile earth, the warmth of sun on her back, the smell of
pine needles she has pinched between her fingers, always remind her of this very special
forest. As she continues up the mountain she lets her hand pass over the stalks of a stand of
reeds that line the path- she is greeted by the rattle of seeds shaking in pods as she brushes
past them. These smells and sounds are like coming home every time she climbs the
mountain. As she walks, a special sort of attention begins to take hold of her, as if her vision
changes- every small movement, every well-known plant, is noticed. The camouflage is
unbelievable, but within it she starts to see tiny bits of movement, animals scurrying here and
there, a new world of being. She could be here forever, on this land, this mountain; she loses
all sense of time.

It is in this reverie that she climbs up the path and comes face to face with a large boulder she
does not recognize. Climbing around the rock, she is surprised to find ahead of her a
breathtakingly beautiful gorge that she did not know was there. Her father and siblings are
here, surrounding a beautiful tender plant that Small One has never seen before. As she
comes up to her father and reaches for his hand she is overcome by the reverence in the
group, the awe in the eyes of her brothers and sisters, the hallowed amazement in her father’s
voice. She does not know for sure what this is, but she knows that it is momentous, and she is
privileged to be here. After a while, her father reaches down and lifts her up to his chest. ‘So,
you found us’, he says with a smile. As if to break the spell that has bound them in this
special moment he says, ‘Small One, do you see the spring running there? Do you know
where it runs to?’. She turns and looks toward the dark tumbling stream. She does know,
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even at her age; it runs to the river at the bottom of the forest where they spend hours
playing. She rests her head on her father’s chest. She can smell the water, see it in her mind’s
eye, running over rocks and into eddies and rushing toward the sea. She does not know, yet,
that years later it will be to that river that they, her siblings and she, will bring the ashes of
this man who holds her now, and release them back into the water. Her father now sets her
gently to earth again and reaches for her small hand. They start up the path again together.
Her siblings squabble and jostle around her. “It’s just a little further”, her father reassures
her. “Let’s go have our tea”.

4.2.2 ‘Wendy’

Biographical sketch

Wendy has been teaching in K-12 programs for 10 years. She emphasized the unstructured
play and freedom in her childhood, when she would spend a great deal of time outside,
camping and fishing with her father, at summer camp, and on weekends and holidays at a
cabin between the ages of six and eleven. Wendy’s descriptions are intuitive and emotional,
but she also describes strong intellectual influences. Growing up, she loved small animals but
remembers mishaps where the animals died with a sense of remorse and wonders if this can
build empathy. In her older years between twelve and twenty-two she spent time outdoors at
school and with friends, but remembers some episodes that were disappointing, such as
camping in the rain or suffering from heat exhaustion. In her mid-twenties she hiked the
coast of England alone; she realized she was happiest when she was outdoors. Wendy earned
a degree in outdoor education and a masters in in environmental education, which deepened
her awareness of human and other-than-human interactions and the evolution of her beliefs
about the false dichotomy between humans and nature. In her current position Wendy is
frustrated by the lack of opportunity to fully share ecological awareness with her students.
She feels the school day is very tightly scheduled, with little freedom for students, and with
many administrative constraints.

Interpretive narrative: Walking Woman and the Waterfall

Waterfall Woman is walking again. She is not called Waterfall Woman yet; that is still to
come. The very act of walking here in the wilderness begins to calm her, soothe the tightness
in her chest. She has been in the city too long, too loud, too crowded. She recognizes again
that it is here, in the wilderness, walking, that she finds joy. The very thought that she is on

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her way back to the waterfall fills her with a suspense, a thrill. It reminds her of when she
was little and would get herself purposely lost, wandering through fields and thickets, until
she no longer knew the way back. She remembers the fear she would feel when she was lost,
but then the thrill at recognizing the way home. She is walking to meet the waterfall- the
great rushing waterfall that she had seen in the summer, when she was strong and whole, and
immersed in this nature. She feels that her energy has dried up and that the waterfall is
calling to her; perhaps it will help her understand what to do next. It has always been walking
that brought her closer to the other beings she knows are here, though she can see no one.

As she gets closer to the falls Waterfall Woman listens for the sound she knows she will
hear; the roaring of water, the power of its presence announced through the forest long before
she even sees it. But it is eerily quiet. “Why?”, she wonders. Then she comes to the bend and
rounds it. Her wild rushing waterfall is only a trickle, running helter-skelter over mossy rocks
into the caverns below. Where is the tumult, the celebration of power and aliveness that she
had seen, had been immersed in, over the summer? Overcome with longing and with loss,
Walking Woman sits down to gaze and contemplate. And then Waterfall speaks. An inner
voice, but as real as the water and rock in front of her. “This is the cycle. You remember the
summer, when I was full and strong and powerful- now my rivers run deep under the caves.
Although on the surface I show only this small stream, it is enough to quench the thirst of
animals and water the land. You also were strong in the summer and feel diminished now.
Know that there are cycles, and this is as it should be. I am in the right place at the right time;
and so are you.” It was as if Waterfall Woman has drunk from the deepest stream and
quenched her thirst, as if she has been lost and found her way home. Wisdom has spoken:
“Trust the cycles”.

4.2.3. ‘Stacy’

Biographical sketch

Stacy teaches in a small state school. She regards herself as a typical product of Generation X
and grew up as media consumption was becoming prolific; she remembers developing her
awareness of anthropogenic effects on the world’s ecosystems through nature documentaries
and the news. She was greatly influenced by a science teacher who taught her to write
science reports and to keep a journal. Her descriptions are often intellectual and
knowledgeable, but she also values the development of empathy and relates a profound

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intuitional experience. Stacy was raised in the country by parents who were loving and
affectionate; her parents and relatives were engaged in nature activities. At school she studied
Amazon rainforests and felt pain and anger at the plight of wild animals. She also had longer
multidisciplinary units of learning at school that focused on local issues such as fishing,
blending history, ecology, and human impacts. She had many pets, which developed her
sense of empathy and responsibility toward animals. She also developed empathy through
reading books, first read to by her parents and teachers, and then reading for herself. Later,
she was heavily influenced by books on country lore, landscape and environmental living.
She became more interested in science in high school and eventually took a degree in
Environmental Management. Through her teen years and into college she was involved in
environmental activism. She earned her master’s in Biology and found herself to be a natural
teacher. She now feels that the best way to make an impact is through growing her own food
and by teaching pupils empathy and care for the Earth.

Interpretive narrative: Stargazer the Journal Keeper

Small change jingles in Stargazer’s pocket as she walks along the country road. She has been
picking raspberries for a little pocket money. Now she is walking home, her journal and her
book under her arm. The fields she is passing are full of peas, and she ventures in to pick
some for herself. She is intrigued by the way the little tendrils hold so fast on the vine, how
the furthest ones wave in the summer air, seeking new gripping places. Instinctively, she
reaches for her journal and pen- it is a reflex, as she has grown used to making notes and
carries the journal everywhere. As she settles under a large oak tree, her lap full of peas, she
flips through the journal. Her hand rests on a half-finished essay, the one she started the
morning her cat died. She is transported by the words on the page to that very morning,
holding her beloved pet as it purrs and meows in turn, the immense grief she feels looking
into the feline’s eyes. Stargazer now wipes her own eyes and sets down the book, taking care
not to place it on the snail making its way along the root of the tree. Once when she was
younger, she had lined up snails on the pavement and smashed them one by one. She smiles
to herself half ruefully, half in light-hearted understanding of this younger child’s desire. She
takes her pen, observes carefully, draws in her book, and takes her notes.

Finished with the notes and the peas, she looks up at the sky. Although obscured by the sun
and clouds she knows that beyond the reflective blue atmosphere, the stars are there.
Sometime in the future she will look up at those stars and they will astound her with a
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profound sense of euphoria and of completeness with the world. Now, she is roused out of
her thoughts by the call of the yellowhammer: “little piece of bread and no cheese!” it sings
melodically. She laughs out loud- just now heading home for a little bit of bread and some
cheese sounds like a good idea.

4.2.4 ‘Brian’

Biographical sketch

Brian is an only child of working class parents. He grew up near a forest, where he played
nearly every day throughout all seasons without limits. When he was older he joined a nature
club, where he was introduced to a group of young men who mentored the younger children,
and as a teenager he became a mentor himself. It was in this community that Brian feels he
began to clearly fall in love with the Earth, and also where he had his first experiences seeing
devastation to a wildlife refuge, which awakened in him a call to activism.

Brian moved abroad and worked on a farm when he was 16, then finished school, went to
college, and worked on a permaculture farm. He became involved with eco-philosophy and
spent the next several years traveling in the company of a professor and other students
around the world with the aim to discover other ways of living, knowing and understanding
in the world. During this time Brian was also doing his teaching education, and then settled
into teaching, which he has been doing for the last 10 years.

Interpretive narrative: Bird Language

The fall was quick, a misplaced step on a rotten branch, high up in the tree. He heard it
crack, and then was tumbling. Now he lay on the ground looking up at his young
companion’s anxious face. “I will get help”, she stammers, and runs off. His arm hurts. He
whimpers and begins to cry; he is only a 6 year old boy, fallen from a pine tree, and alone.

A small songbird sails down from the tree and lands on a twig not far from him. She cocks
her head and comforts him with a caring gaze. It must be 20 minutes that he lies there with
her watching over him. In those minutes, they speak intimately in a way that, as a child, he is
open to. What does she speak of for those 20 minutes, when time stands still in her alert gaze
and she takes him to another place where there is no pain? Even he will not remember all of
it, but he knows she said this, “I care, and love is enough. Know that you are loved, know
that you are purposeful and good, and you have worth in the world”. She told him, “There is

55
more to this world than you can see, and you will grow up to experience much and love it
all”. She said, “This is your place, here in the more than human world”.

When the adults come running through the brush to find him, still on the ground, the little
songbird is gone. He never sees her again, yet she sees him. She follows him, and she tells
the others, for birds also speak to each other. “Look, follow him”, they say, “he is in that
circle of children; he is there in the tent where Mother Bear is sniffing. Look, he is working
on that farm. He is traveling the world- take care of him; he is there at the river and in the
desert!” On a spring afternoon a songbird calls out “Here he is, he is with the children there-
Look how he is teaching them about the natural spaces, about love and worth and their own
place in the wider world.” He has never seen the bird again, but she has told the ones in
flight, and they have told their kin. They too, watch over him, for he still speaks with birds,
and they with him.

4.2.5 ‘Beth’

Biographical sketch

Beth has been a teacher for many years, but has recently quit to start her own business. She
attributes her growing ecological awareness to her family background, avid reading, and
nature connectedness. She was raised, first, in a suburban environment in what she terms a
very normal middle class upbringing with “junk food and white bread”. Her mother became
ill when she was 11 and soon after they moved to the country. Her mother became involved
in alternative healing methods, started growing her own food in their garden, and taught Beth
about healing herbs. The family had dogs and she played with puppies on the lawn, where
her father taught her that the bees would not hurt her if she did not bother them. In the
countryside she spent many hours in the forest near their house, playing with friends when
she was younger, on walks alone with her dog as she grew older, and with boyfriends in her
teens. Beth had always been interested in the intricateness of life. When she went to college
she met an indigenous teacher who influenced her, and she began to read The Celestine
Prophecy and explore concepts of cosmic interconnectedness.

When she met her partner, she moved to a new country and continued to spend a great deal
of time in nature. She became a teacher in a school where she was able to involve students in
projects that gave them intimate connection to the land and to ecological systems, but still
felt that there was a lot of hypocrisy and that the school did not live up to its mission. She

56
continues to read widely and to develop her thoughts around consciousness and
interconnectedness.

Interpretive narrative: The Pattern Keeper

Pattern keeper is on a trail she knows well, in the forest near her home, walking her dog. She
enjoys these walks through varying terrain, some high and dry, some wet and swampy. Her
dog pulls gently on the leash, leading her over to the edge of an open meadow. He is sniffing
the brush, and then squats down to do his business. She sits, leaning back comfortably
against the wide trunk of an oak, nestled between the gnarled roots, and looks out over the
meadow. Finished, the dog comes over to her and she rubs him behind the ears; he leans
against her. She has had him since he was a puppy- she remembers the birth, the tiny
squirming mass, playing with him and his brothers and sisters on the lawn. She walks over to
cover the dog poo with leaves- already small insects are crawling on it, and two bees are
buzzing around. They pay her no mind as she finishes placing the litter and she is not
bothered by them. She is mesmerized by the pattern on the leaves, the tiny veins spreading
out from the larger ones, fractal upon fractal, like a kaleidoscope. She is often lost in
contemplation over the intricateness of things, pausing while cutting a purple cabbage to
marvel at the intricate winding pattern within. She smiles to herself and stands to look toward
her dog. He is at attention, fur up, looking across the meadow. As she follows his gaze she
catches sight of two brown ears twitching. The dog is off, and she laughs; he will never catch
that rabbit. As her dog runs in the sun, then rolls in the meadow grass, she follows him to a
sunny spot. Bright blue butterflies dart in and out of the grass; they too, are mesmerizing. She
is filled with a gratitude for the world. She yearns for a way satisfy her deep curiosity and
express the cosmic connection she feels. Someday soon she will leave for college- there she
will meet teachers who explain connections between meadows and rabbits and blue
butterflies. She will walk other forests half a world away, teach children about watersheds,
and help them to find their own magic in the intricacy and interconnectedness of the beautiful
world. For now, it is time to call her dog and head home.

4.2.6 ‘Martin’

Biographical sketch

Martin was raised near relatives who were ecologists and naturalists. His speech is full of
sensuous description and scientific analogy. He remembers walks with a family friend who

57
took him on walks around a park her son managed, explaining natural interactions. Later he
went to visit a girlfriend at college and saw large mountains for the first time. He
immediately wanted to climb the mountain, and has climbed that particular one many times
since. He often trekked alone, as he did not know anyone else who wanted to hike.

When he met his wife, who was interested in mountain climbing, they traveled and he would
also hike into the mountains, fishing and trekking in many parts of the world and
experiencing beauty in nature. After high school Martin studied science, and then took a
masters’ in ecology. He says it was nature that made him a teacher. He is currently teaching
science and is conflicted about how to explain the dire state of the planet to students who
seem not to have a personal connection to nature.

Interpretive narrative: Mountain Trekker and the Night Sky

Mountain Trekker sits in the kayak with the night sky raining stars. The fish dart like
shooting stars below him, his paddle drips light into the lake. On another lake, much
younger, he had also sat and gazed at falling stars, the Perseus meteor shower sending streaks
across the sky. Tomorrow, he will finish this hike. He has had many hikes, has scaled the
seven peaks, and can find no other place he is so at home than on the trail. It has been this
way since he saw his first mountain and promised he would summit it. There is something
about the mountain, calling him back time after time; it has changed him. This trail is
unfamiliar, and he will take it slowly. His thoughts wander as he treks. He was not raised
with mountains but near farmland, near rivers that flooded in spring into mud flats where he
searched for arrowheads. A snake glides across the path in front of him and remembers
another trail with snakes in spring, darting and hissing around his aunt as she steps off the
trail. She is unfazed; perhaps he has learned his ease with the natural world from her, for he
is at home alone in this wilderness.

However, he cannot stay out here another day. He reaches the car at dusk and starts the drive
up to the top of the ridge, where he will meet his companion. The road is steep and crooked.
Concentrated on the drive, he is entirely unprepared for the view that greets him as he
reaches the summit. There, a magnificent sun is setting over a sea of wisping clouds;
mountain peaks rise like islands in the distance. The setting sun is painting the clouds in
crimson hues. It takes his breath away, this sublime beauty of sky and earth.

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4.2.7 ‘Kevin’

Biographical sketch

Kevin was raised in a working class household. He played outdoors whenever he could and
saw this as a place beyond four walls, a place to be free. He can remember playing hide and
seek, his face close to the earth, hiding under bushes. Nature at that time was a place to play
and a place to be; he was not aware at that time of anything special except that it was good to
be in this sense of freedom. While at school Kevin became an avid bike rider and loved to
ride through the countryside. He was also a photographer and loved taking pictures of nature,
though at the time he saw it more as a 2D composition. He traveled to India where he studied
natural healing, then went to university to study Art and eventually became an art teacher.

Kevin works in a state primary school but finds the requirements of full time teaching almost
impossible if one is to spend adequate time and attention with each student. In the past year
he has reduced his course load and is engaged in environmental activism, as he finds what he
is able to teach primary students does not offer them what they need to prepare them for the
world they are to inherit.

Interpretive narrative: Kelp Swimmer

Kelp Swimmer lies in the tent and listens to the rain fall on the canvas; the sound takes him
back to his earliest memories of rain falling on his pram. He is alone tonight, as his brother
and friend left in the morning; last night they had all been here together, crammed like happy
comfortable sardines into their sleeping bags, telling stories. Earlier in the day they had
climbed the steep mountain behind the camp in an exhilarating race to the top, adrenaline
racing. Now, his sore muscles and exhaustion put him quickly to sleep.

In the morning, the birds wake him, and again he briefly recalls lying in a pram listening to
that same melodic chirping. Rising, he makes coffee and sits outside the tent, taking in the
natural world around him. All is still and there is no time pressure nor obligation. A feeling
of deep connectedness washes over him- he is part of all of this; it is part of him. He begins
to weep, not in sorrow, but in grateful overwhelm.

He walks down to the beach and dives into the cool water. A kelp forest, all browns and
golds, like autumn, surrounds him. Diving feels like flying, free from confinement, in open
space, like riding his first bike as fast as he could, the wind rushing through his hair . All
around him is an intricate explosion of life- tiny fish darting in and out of tendrilled kelp,
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reminiscent of a nature documentary he remembers watching, but he is living this one. As he
glances up toward the sky he sees the sun slanting through the kelp, these magnificent
structures rising like trees, spreading their tendrils fanlike toward the sky, and sunlight
slanting down in long shafts. Again, he is transported, standing in Gaudi’s La Sagrada
Familia, a human made forest rising around him. Again he is overwhelmed by the beauty of
the place. His morning swim over, he walks back to camp, collects the cups and plates from
breakfast and makes sure the fire is stamped out. Now, he will cycle home, racing down the
mountain, relishing a sense of freedom with the wind rushing through his hair.

4.2.8 ‘ Terry’

Biographical sketch

Terry was raised in an upper middle class home with two cultures. He frequently traveled
between two countries to visit his grandparents on his mother’s side. With his father he spent
time fishing and camping, and often stayed out on an island where there was no human
development. With his grandparents he spent time in the mountains in natural surroundings
and spent a good deal of time with and around wild animals and birds. He was shy in
kindergarten, and throughout his early years he spent hours outdoors observing nature,
rescuing wild animals, and using his imagination to take himself into the lives of other
creatures. In high school Terry drifted into the mainstream culture. He had girlfriends, drank
beer with friends, and moved away from his earlier nature experiences. Then, feeling that he
was missing something, he traveled to Costa Rica and worked on a permaculture project.
There he talked to a young man who told him of a school that taught indigenous lore. He
subsequently went to that school.

When Terry moved to a larger city to work in computers and data, he again became
enmeshed in mainstream western culture. He worked from 9 to 5, went to pubs after work,
and spent up to four hours a day playing video games. Again, he came to feel he was missing
something. Finally he gave himself a challenge to start reading about something that
interested him and subsequently studied plant medicine. He then went back to school, studied
biology, took teacher education training, and then a master’s in ecology. He currently teaches
classes and nature experiences in schools and feels this is the best way to make a difference
in the world.

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Interpretive narrative: Mink visits Trout Cradler

Mink scurries through the underbrush in the forest, nose close to the ground, moving deftly
around and over branches, stopping briefly to sniff at scat, then hurrying on toward the river,
intent on catching fish. At the water’s edge he glances up to see a man sitting still at the
water’s edge. The man feels familiar to him. He has come here this morning to look for trout
as well.

The man rose early. It has been raining heavily, and he senses now is the right time. He takes
his bike up the lane in the dark, with just the light on the handlebars to guide him. Now, he
sits quietly, waiting for Trout. He sits watching the river, as silently as Mink sits watching
him. He focuses on Trout, and remembers being a boy, cradling Trout, feeling her rough
scale and her heft, taking her to bed with him and sleeping with her, smelling her fishiness
and holding her close. He sits and watches as patiently as, when he was a boy, he would sit
and wait for butterflies, gaze into the eyes of lizards, or wait for Crow to come to him and sit
on his shoulder. And now he sees her, her silver back rising in the water- she has come. A
sense of exhilaration mixed with calm fills him. He can feel the cool water gliding past her
smooth body. He sits so silently, unmoving as he experiences oneness with Trout, that he
barely notices when a badger comes and nuzzles under his butt for grubs. Mink moves warily
further into the underbrush. Morning is dawning over the hill. The man is slowly separating
from his experience with Trout. He will have to pull himself away from here; the normal
world is clamoring for him to go back into its tumult. He rises gently and walks back up the
trail. Mink sniffs as he goes by, then heads up the riverbank.

4.3 Analysis
The first section of analysis speaks briefly to the interpretive analysis by narrative, above.
The next summarizes the participants’ descriptions of their ecological worldview through
their reflections and discussion of the New Ecological Paradigm and other nature scales. The
thematic analysis that follows is based on coding developed through the interviews and
biographies as well as the conceptual framework. The third section is a summary of teachers’
reflections on how their ecological viewpoints affects their interactions in schools, summing
up with a reflection on how schools might develop ecological awareness in students, which
was the starting point of this research project.

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4.3.1 Analysis by narrative

The teacher’s stories, amalgamated into chronologically compacted fiction and offered as
analysis by narrative in the section above, are not only vignettes of events in their lives but
are imbued with the philosophy, mentalities, and characters of the persons who told them.
Small one, as a child, is slow but determined, with deeply honed senses, smell and touch as
well as sight and sound and smell. Kelp swimmer loves the exhilaration of openness and
speed, is full of visually sensuous tellings and deep emotions. The stories display an
emotional quality that came through in my interactions with participants as well in their
tellings: Stargazer is rational and contemplative but also aware of irony and quick to mirth.
Waterfall whisperer and Pattern Keeper are both seekers of truth, noticing detail,
contemplating the universe and open to its messages. Mountain trekker invokes sensuous
memories that are imbued with the beauty of nature, Bird talker speaks easily of animism and
will always return to the emotional quality of love. Trout cradler is fully at home in the more
than human world; his stories blur the lines between himself and the rest of the natural world,
as the fictional narrative around his stories does too. The analysis by narrative presentations
reveal both the developmental and the accretive nature of teachers’ ecological awareness
along with the attendant senses, emotions, and values that are not as holistically available
through a strictly analytical mode, thus contributing to De Sousa Santos’ (2016) notion of a
dialog that answers the question “what are teachers narrated life experiences regarding their
development of ecological awareness?” These will be developed in the thematic analysis that
follows, which works to complement the search for knowledge.

4.3.2 Worldview

Before the interviews, teachers filled out the 15 question NEP. In the first part of the
interview we discussed their answers to this as well as to a selection of other nature scales.
My interest here was to develop their reflections on their own ecological awareness, or as the
NEP refers to it, their ecological paradigm.

All the respondents were in strong agreement with statements on the NEP that “Plants and
animals have as much right as humans to exist”, “Despite our special abilities humans are
still subject to the laws of nature” and “If things continue on their present course, we will
soon experience a major ecological catastrophe.”. Yet, Wendy questioned, “What is an
ecological catastrophe in the big picture? What is that? Is it the disappearance of humans?
I don’t think so”. They were also all in strong disagreement that “Humans were meant to rule
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over the rest of nature”, that “The so-called 'ecological crisis' facing humankind has been
greatly exaggerated” and that “Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works
to be able to control it.”. In general they demonstrated a high degree of rejection of
exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, and a high degree of belief in the possibility of
ecological crisis. However, they often had more nuanced responses to statements referring to
limits to growth, and the fragility of nature’s balance. Stacy noted, “I don’t believe in a
‘balance of nature”. Teachers reflected on the resilience of nature, and were critical of the
tendency of the survey to use the term “humans” non-discriminately without specifying
epoch, culture, or geographic region.

Connection

All the participants expressed beliefs in the interconnectedness of humans with nature but
also noted some difficulty maintaining that in our current society. To questions about their
relationship with nature, they all responded along the lines that humans are nature, so there is
no separation. This might be viewed as more spiritual or more physical, as Sarah said,

Well, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and you are only, I believe that you
then come back in some form…the energy doesn’t disappear, so it’s always there.
Wendy concurs with this sense of oneness, though in more spiritual or intuitional language,

I feel like you are as an extension of consciousness…that's what I'm aware of is

that I’m part of something bigger. I am in co-creation and…I'm the hands of
whatever embraces us or whatever we are part of.
Others were simply matter-of-fact in their appraisal, as Brian said in regard to being a part of
nature, “Of course we are, I mean I am, it is real… it’s just reality”, and Stacy added, “I
regard human beings as part of nature so I can't really separate myself from that.” The
perception of their oneness with the natural world was juxtaposed with an understanding that
they could not always maintain that awareness in the day to day living in modern society.

Separation

Despite a strong affirmation of their connection to nature, in fact, of being nature, the
teachers also recognized a separation, in most cases attributed to the culture we live in, or in
some cases to the place they were. Terry recounted how when he was young, “I have vivid
memories of being a young child, of oneness, I remember that well, that I had all through
childhood.”, but then, as an adult, indicating his sense of connectedness on the Nature
Connectedness scale, he says, “it depends on my stress levels…if I have to do all my
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business stuff, I fall into that one ( a lower indication on the scale), so I am dancing between
the two.” Sarah enjoined, “I don’t think I believe that I am as connected as I would like to be,
particularly in the northern hemisphere… but I think in the southern hemisphere as a child, I
would have put myself in (the fully connected indication on the scale).” Martin also indicated
a difference depending on place and access to nature, saying, “I think it depends… I used to
live in much more rural settings than I live now, but here, there is not much nature.”. Brian
sums up, describing the effect of culture on a sense of connectedness,

To me humans are most definitely a part of nature, there’s nothing that separates
us… whereas if you were to ask me, where do I see myself as living… as a part
of the culture I live in, I see myself living as part of a culture that doesn’t agree
with this…and then culturally, I do hear other voices saying something else, and I
do identify with them because I grew up with them, and I live my life as if they
were true.

Nature of humanity

Another area of dichotomy was expressed as participants recognized looming ecological

catastrophe but also challenged the way that the NEP attributed this to humans in general,
arguing that for the large part of human existence, we have not been as destructive as now. In
response to the statement “Humans are interfering with nature”, Kevin responded, “Humans,
native people, are they interfering with nature? Which Humans? Probably a large number of
humans are, but not all”. Brian again referred to culture as a deciding factor, noting,

I don’t think it has to do with humans, I think it has to do with culture. And then
saying humans is wrong, because humans have been on this Earth for several
million years at least, as far as we know, and we haven’t destroyed the
environment for seven million years.
Martin noted that we must separate modern vs. non-modern humans and also recognize that
other organisms also modify their environment. Beth said there are “a lot more humans that
are living lives where they are taking care of earth and taking care of their families, than
there are humans who are abusing”, and added, “It is difficult to answer when you say
humans…it does not help the ecological problem if we (paint all humans black)”.

Stacy reacted to a statement that humans have disrupted the balance of nature, pointing out,

When you study population biology and you see that in many populations you
have this constant ebb and flow of relations going up and down in accordance
with ecological circumstances, so there's not really any balance which kind of
suggests an even keel somewhere, it’s not a balance, it's an up and down, it's
waves- you have catastrophic events, and you have gradual events so that that

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 term is … I don’t really believe in ecological balance.
Challenges to the wording and the generalizations in the NEP were also voiced in response to
the statement that “Earth is like a spaceship”, and “modifying the environment”. The concept
of earth as a spaceship struck Brian as “just wrong” as he says, we didn’t design this earth,
and it’s not for us to design”. Beth retorts, “Earth is definitely not a spaceship!” and describes
Earth’s intricate connectedness with the entire solar system. On “modifying the environment”
Martin says, we’ve been modifying the environment as long as we’ve been around, and other
organisms also modify their environment to suit their needs”. Kevin adds, “Modifying nature
doesn’t necessarily mean destroying nature”.

4.3.3 Themes

In designing my research, a large part of my inquiry centered around how teachers developed
their sense of ecological awareness. No one teacher pointed to one momentous occasion,
although several teachers related profound experiences throughout their lives. In general,
they acknowledged that there was something that had always been there, that the
circumstances in which they were raised had an impact on their understanding of
connectedness to nature, and that a variety of experiences were responsible for gradual shifts,
what Kevin called the “realization of something that was always there, but also an increasing
understanding”, and that Wendy termed “a deepening process”.

Through my literature review, I had identified several areas I hoped to develop as themes and
code in response to the interviews with the participants, based on the various pathways I saw
presented through the literature. However, the interviews developed a much richer and
deeper tapestry with some themes than I had anticipated. Four of these themes had a strong
presence in the lives of each one of the participants, and also revealed qualities that may be
unique to developing ecological awareness. These are, Access to Nature, Freedom and
Timelessness, Solitude, and The Casual Mentor.

4.3.4 Themes common to participants

Access to Nature

I grew up just next to a forest, and I can say that on a very personal level I do believe it saved
my life, on many levels. -Brian

Every participant in this study spoke of nearly unrestricted time outdoors and in natural
spaces. They spent most of their time out of school outdoors, in forests, on hikes, or in
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gardens. Sarah says, “As a child, all my time not spent at school was spent in the garden, at
our holiday cottage on the river, or sailing boats on a dam in a shared cottage in the
mountains.” Brian commented,

I made myself a snack when I was little when I came home from school and then
we went outside… we would take care of ourselves and what we did was we
went into the forest because, what else would we do?
Wendy describes playing outdoors, “From the time I got home from school and at the lake at
the cabin I would be outside all day”. For Stacy the outdoors meant farmland, berry picking,
and time on an island with her father.

Memories start early and are grounded in the senses; Kevin can remember lying in a pram
listening to rain falling and birds singing. Later memories included growing up with a large
yard that was

…quite overgrown with fruit trees, a little lake, a pond…. playing in the woods
was special… running around and hiding, so much to hide behind and hide in,
being close to the ground, yeah, and just that, my uncle playing these games
where we chase each other around and not four walls, but makes me see nature
was very much a playground, more of a space to be.
Sarah speaks of how she can still remember every smell and the sounds of reeds brushing in
her childhood walks with her father from the age of five. Terry recounts spending hours
while still very young sitting quietly and waiting for a particular butterfly to land, gazing into
the eyes of lizards, and rescuing a crow when he was in kindergarten.

Animals, and perhaps unexpectedly, pets, were a reoccurring element of these teachers’
access to nature. Pets served as a window, too, into the emotional life of more than human
creatures. Terry says, about the crow that he had rescued and then took home,

So, I had a connection with that crow, and he was free, wasn’t in a cage or
anything but he always came, and I started taking to the crow and made sounds,
so he was my friend, and it was pretty cool so that had a pretty big impact.
Beth played with puppies on the lawn and Kevin had a “loving close connection” to a cat that
died when he was 4 years old. Stacy also reflected on empathy developed by the death of
pets. She recounts,

My cat was on her deathbed and in pain and I remember the cat meowing
because she basically just wanted affection, and I can remember like, my grief,
and the way that she actually… she was probably in unspeakable pain, but she
was purring. I was stroking her and then you know I think the next day actually
she died, so those moments… those moments are yeah, when you really realize
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 that animals have an emotional life and emotional needs and they're not so very
different from us.
Sometimes it is mishaps or misadventure with animals that also lead to empathy. Wendy tells
the story of how she set out to rescue small frogs and ended with tragedy:

It was in this undeveloped area probably a kilometre away from my house that
we would go home and then come back with buckets and I…I remember going
by myself as well but and then just get the frogs. They were so cute-they were
little dark black frogs and the tadpoles as well. We took more frogs and then
brought them home in a bucket and put them in the garage…I remember when I
finally did go back in the garage a few days later, I think it was even a week later,
it was so hot inside the garage it evaporated, essentially, and they were just
skeletons...I just felt horrible and actually the image that comes into my mind
sometimes is pictures of people’s skeletal remnants in the holocaust, so…they
had suffered.
Stacy tells her story of stomping on snails, and says,

I suppose I could talk about the naughty things that I did as a child, because I
think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about, but I think that people
that are very ecologically aware perhaps some of the things that they did when
they were child weren't particularly good.
Wendy wonders if these experiences with nature are also necessary for empathy and then
responsibility to develop,

I sometimes ponder, while I witness kids in their environments, if we need to be

unwittingly responsible for the suffering and death of other living being in order
to feel the deep sorrow, and then accountability.

Freedom and timelessness

When I immerse myself in nature, I feel like everything else in the world can disappear.
– Sarah

Related to access to nature are the elements of freedom and timelessness that can be
experienced in natural environments when constraints are lifted. The teachers in this study
reflected on the freedom they had to roam, and the timelessness they experienced growing up
with access to the outdoors and to nature. Brian told me, “That’s something that my
parents really gave me, they gave me the gift of time…it was a roaming environment…”.
Terry says, ‘I was allowed to do anything I wanted; there were no limits”. Sarah enjoins, “my
parents were not particularly fussy, they knew that we were the only people in that valley,
actually, so we could go wherever we liked”, and Wendy tells a story of getting herself
intentionally lost in order to have the thrill of finding her way back home. She says,

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 I think of kids now and would they, when they were seven or eight years old,
would your parents let you go, or would you allow yourself to be lost without a
cell phone? Would I be able to do it now, as a kid, without a cell phone? Will
anybody get to experience that?
There were also no, or few, restrictions on time. These teachers talked about being outside all
the time, mostly unrestricted, and even sometimes simply staying out all night, sleeping or
playing. As Brian explains,

We didn’t have a concept of time, as you do as a child, so we just we didn’t

realize, and especially in the summers,…because it doesn’t get dark, so we had
no concept of time and we might come home at 5 o'clock in the morning thinking
it was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and that was…when I tell these stories people
say well your parents must have been awfully brave, letting you just play outside,
but that was just what we did, and they knew who we were with, they knew
where we were, I mean they could come and fetch us if something happened,
they did at times.
Sarah describes time at their cabin, where they would roam far from home and where their
only restriction was to come back for dinner.

So we could go, we could go for a day, a day at a time, we had to come back for
dinner, but I don’t think we even ate, we just enjoyed being outdoors so much
that we would walk, for quite a long way, hour two hours upriver, and then we
would float down the river, just on our bellies, or where the river was very
shallow we could pull ourselves along on the rocks…we would honestly forget
time, and it was so bad that my mother used to had to go buy a whistle- she didn’t
know where we were, so we knew her whistle tone.

Solitude

I enjoy the closeness to the natural world that

comes when you're alone in an empty wood. -Martin

Particularly surprising to me as I read over the transcripts, was the impact of solitude that
came up multiple times in the stories of teachers discussing the development of their
ecological awareness, and especially of deeply profound experiences had while alone. Brian
and Terry were both only children. Others had siblings but were the youngest, or experienced
times when they hiked or traveled alone, or were alone at specific times when they had their
most profound experiences. Beth recounts how she used to walk alone in the forest near her
house when she was a teenager as Wendy did in at her mother’s boyfriend’s cabin. Sarah
tells of being the smallest and youngest, and walking alone behind her other siblings on hikes
in the forest. Martin hiked alone through his young adult years because he simply didn’t
know anyone else who liked to hike. He says of that time in his life and the experiences he
had, “Although I did not know it at the time, my environmental ideas were changing.”
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Solitude was described as a time when profound realizations and emotional and sensory
experiences often took place.

Guidance: The casual mentor

He told a story about a tree in his garden, which was a particular tree, an individual tree, and
that was also something to me because I remember at this time, it turned things on its head. –
Brian

The final theme that was revealed through all the teachers’ narratives was the impact of
significant others on the development of their ecological awareness. In many cases however,
these were not interactions that were planned or designed as instructive, and the relationship
was not one of formal mentorship, or even in some cases, with the awareness on the part of
the other that they were having an impact. Although this is a type of guided interaction, I am
calling this type of interactional experience the casual mentor because I identify these as
separate from formal instruction or even often, as formal relationship, but still crucial in these
teachers’ lives. In several cases this casual mentor was a family member, but in other cases it
was a friend, a companion, or even a chance encounter.

Martin grew up with a relationship with a person he called Aunt, even though this person did
not have a familial relationship. In one story he tells how she was pointing out a local feature
and stepped off the path they were on. She was immediately surrounded by hundreds of
hissing snakes but was completely unfazed by this. Martin says, “I can’t remember what she
was showing- I just remember the snakes, snakes, and how little it seemed to impact her”.
She lived on a farm and had children who were involved in parks management; all of these
relationships had a strong impact on Martin’s future studies in environmental management.
Stacy, likewise, had an uncle who was an ecologist and a mother who was a member of the
Audubon society and an avid bird watcher. Sarah’s father took the family on hikes up the
mountain behind their house, and Beth’s father played with them with their puppies on the
lawn and when they went out to pet them there would be bees everywhere, attracted to the
puppy poo. Her father said, “they will not harm you if you don’t have any intention of harm
toward them”, and allowed them to crawl over his hand. Terry says, of his relationship with
his father and grandfather,

I figured out later on that they were mentoring me. They would always be really
happy when I came back with something, and would say, “Why don’t you look
that up in a book?”

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In other cases the casual mentor was not family and might be even less aware of the role they
were playing in the teachers’ ecological awareness. Brian looked up to older boys in his
youth program, and remembers being impacted by a discussion two of them were having
about the impending destruction of the wildlife area they were in. Although they were not
addressing the younger boys, they overheard and began to ask questions. Brian attributes this
to the beginning of the development of his activism. Another boy in the group was called ‘the
philosopher’ because of the way he would casually express his understanding of a personal
relationship with nature. This too, was something that affected Brian and helped him
recognize that this was a natural way to interact with the environment. Terry had a chance
encounter with a young man in Costa Rica who talked to him about a school that taught
indigenous living- he then went and joined the school. Wendy had a chance encounter with a
bookstore owner who suggested books on nature guiding to her, which resulted in a later
career. In each case the respondents pointed out the sense of ecological or nature awareness
the person had, and the casual way in which they offered their knowledge, understandings
and advice.

4.3.5 Pathways toward ecological awareness

The experiential: Being sensing and feeling in nature.

When you experience something dramatic, it changes you,

and changes your perspective to it. -Martin

All of the participants in the study told stories of being in nature that were charged with
either emotional or sensual descriptions, and often with both. Of all the sensual descriptions,
most were visual, as with Martin’s telling of stars and a paddle dripping light in a
bioluminescent lake. Sarah offered tellings of sound, touch, and smells as well. Kevin spoke
of bird song and the sound of rain on his pram when he was just a baby, Sarah of running her
hand across reeds, the sound of their rattle, and the smell of pine needles on her fingers.
Stacy told of stroking her dying cat and listening to her purr. Those who did not offer sensual
description told of emotional connections. Some were positive, as with Brian’s descriptions
of love of place, or biophilia, and of “being in nature…learning to love it before you can
learn to protect it…when we were younger, we were innately in love with it,…but when we
were older, we needed to fall in love with a place.”.

Wendy spoke of fear she sometimes felt when she got lost wandering around the forest,

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but then of the thrill she felt when she found her way back home. She also told of a
sense of guilt that she felt when she brought home the small frogs who dehydrated in
the heat, as did Stacy when she told of lining up snails and stomping on them when she
was little, but both felt this may have been a necessary step to developing empathy.
Stacy also spoke of sadness and anger she felt as a young person watching nature
shows on TV and learning of threats to wildlife; Martin described the sense of dread he
feels now as he contemplates the ecological crisis but also a sense of the beauty when
being out in nature. Kevin too, spoke of crying at the feeling of connectedness in
nature, but that they were not tears of sadness but of overwhelm. Stacy described the
sense of euphoria she had as she gazed at stars in a night sky. In common with the
sensual and emotional experiences described by all of the teachers is that they link to
intuitive awakenings, realizations, or transformational experiences, most often also in
moments of solitude.

The intuitional: intuitive or transformational experiences.

It was like a massive turning point- Stacy

Every teacher in this cohort recounted a type of realization, transformation, or intuitional

knowing that happened most often when they were alone, and described these with sensual or
emotional language. One of Brian’s most profound experiences happened alone in the forest
when he was very little and had fallen out of a tree, and he was in strong communion with a
bird that came “sailing down” to sit near him, tilted its head toward him and gazed at him.
Wendy relates experiences connected to trekking alone along the English coast, a situation
that she did not plan for but occurred when a friend could not make it at the last minute, and
says she felt in moments of solitude, “the presence of something else and it actually makes
me think of yeah, being connected to other things.”. Stacy experienced a profound
connection to the stars and to a sense of oneness while out alone at night on an island, and
says that even though she is not a spiritual person it was one of the most profound
experiences she has had:

I was out on my own at night on an island…where I live when I looked up at the

stars. I, I felt really a strong sense of connectedness, oneness with nature. I've
never had quite the same experience since. It was like kind of a peak
experience…it was kind of like a euphoric sense of connection.
Kevin relates a time in the early morning, alone outside with his cup of coffee, where he too
was overwhelmed by a sense of connectedness,
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 Earlier on this year I was sitting in the woods, and that was a time when it really
hit me…I noticed, just no rush, Saturday morning, everyone else still in bed, the
sun coming in the trees, and this intense experience of being a part of nature and
nature being a part of me, and, emotionally very intense as well, and I cried, but
not in a painful way, but sort of a realization connected tears which is not about
sorrow in that way but somehow this very intensive experience, which was one of
those...well, I didn’t feel sad, just overwhelmed.
Terry, an only child who spent much time outdoors interacting with wildlife, recounted a
practice that began when he was very young, when he started recreating walks he had had
around his favourite island through his imagination as he drifted off to sleep. He would
pretend to be animals-

I would be mink, and I would see what the mink saw, and catch fish, and have
quarrels with crows, and I had a thing with lizards, I had lizards for 4 years and I
would start thinking I felt what they felt…it came naturally, I’ve always done it.
He explains that having developed this, it is something he is able to practice even to this day,
“Right now I can feel how it is for some ravens up there and I know where they sleep, and I
can go into the landscape and I can do it basically all the time.”. Sarah, too, tells of a time
when she walked a long trail, camping out under the stars. She was with others, but as she
knew she would walk more slowly, she would get up early in the morning to start the trek
and have some time before the others caught up with her. In these early morning walks, she
says of the experience of long trekking and solitude, and of the way her perception shifted,

It’s really fascinating, because the first day you can’t see so well, you know? You
can’t see all the intricate details as well as you want to…but when I woke up,
under the moon…my eyes just changed, you know? They shifted, and you could
start seeing things…by the end of it I was so attuned to that surroundings, to
those surroundings, that I missed it, it was almost like you come out of it and you
go, oh now I miss, I want to just be there.
Beth told of cutting into a red cabbage and being taken with the intricacy of the pattern
inside, so much so that when she voiced it her mother warned her not to talk like that in
front of other people. Solitude and sensual experiences combined in the telling of these
teachers and resulted in descriptions of transformational experiences.

The intellectual: education, books and media

I feel like I've had a significant shift since doing my

master’s in environmental education.- Wendy

In the interviews I had asked specific questions about the impact of knowledge, instruction,
and education on changes to participants’ values, perceptions, values or ethics with regards to

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human interactions with the natural world. A few of the teachers had impactful experiences
of early education. Stacy mentioned a primary school teacher who kindled her interest in
science and in keeping a journal, a practice she kept throughout her schooling. She says,

I had a really good science teacher and she had to write taught us how to write
science reports and, and make (drawings of) bugs and observations and that kind
of thing and that really appealed to my kind of…to kind of have this systematic
record of observations and thoughts and ideas.
She also described large school projects that would integrate learning about species of fish
with trips to the watershed and to fishing villages. Sarah experienced a program called
“school in the wild”, where students would “learn about nature, play games, draw
observational pictures, go on night hikes, and be put to work removing invasive species of
plants.”.

For others, the impact of school and education came later on and not necessarily in formal
venues. After high school and his trip to Costa Rica, Terry spent several months in an
indigenous school where he was exposed to nature survival and had profound changes in
perception. He says,

When I went to that school, I stayed in the forest, I lived in the forest, and I lived
primitively…to try to generalize, it sort of made the inner and outer dimensions a
little blurry. So, I would say that the vision quest was part of it, but mostly when I
got solid proof that I could do the spirit walk for instance, where I went places in
guided meditations in my mind and then I came back and I walked on the land,
on the physical land and I could see stuff that I had seen on my spirit, that was
kind of where you get some proof.
Formal bachelor and master’s education has also had an impact on teachers’ ecological
awareness. Beth trained to be a teacher, and explains,

As a teacher you had to take this environmental science course…and it really

went into how everything is connected and if the ecosystem is disturbed…the
blue butterflies in England had all but disappeared. Someone figured out that (it
was) because they were building all these suburbs in the countryside that
encroached on the land of the rabbits, and the rabbits ate down the grass, so it
was a certain temperature, and then the eggs of the butterflies needed that
temperature to hatch, and I remember that story and thinking…
Beth also met an Ojibwe elder in this course who,

was a wonderful teacher and also taught about how…this belief that nature wants
to work with us. We are like teenagers coming to understand that mom’s ok.
Nature wants to work with you.

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All but one of the teachers have gone on to take masters’ degrees in environmental education,
ecology, biology or nature based arts. Wendy says it, “helped me see the multiple
worldviews and integrate differently so I feel, I still feel like I'm integrating…I feel since
then there has been an integration, a softening in the bigger picture”.

In addition to formal instruction, several teachers mentioned books that had guided them, and
two teachers in particular mentioned the influence of television, nature shows and podcasts
that gave new information and insights. Stacy, especially, mentioned several books she read
as a teenager and young adult that influenced her perceptions and later choices. Both Beth
and Terry mentioned the same book, The Celestine Prophesies, as having had a profound
effect on them in their late teens and early adulthood. Stacy and Kevin both mentioned nature
programs that affected their awareness and understanding of nature, and Kevin mentioned
listening to podcasts, both about medicine and then about nature, that changed his
perceptions about the interconnectedness and dependency of humans and nature.

Community

I think it’s completely central-Kevin

A sense of community was often important for the teachers in this study, but they found this
in different ways. While other teachers described lonelier upbringing, or mentioned siblings
and friends offhandedly, for Brian, an only child, the community of youngsters in his
neighborhood had an important impact on his freedom to roam in the woods,

I don’t think I would have come up with the idea on my own…but because we
were a community…,we knew each other, all the families knew each other we
felt safe, and we were more than friends, we were just, we grew up together.
In describing his youth as well, Brian referred to the community of classmates and
especially to the nature group he belonged to through his teens,
and the community is very important…, we really became a community, a local
community at first but then it grew, because we became the local chapter and
then of course we became the regional chapter and then we were part of the
national organization eventually.
At an older age, one of the influences developed through teachers’ education, and especially
through their masters, had to do with the community of learners, what Beth called “the
community of intellectuals”. Martin expounds on this,

I will say that being part of, going to school for environmental science, you tend
to meet more people that in that profession, I guess, that have similar ways to

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 think that you have so I think that there's a strong correlation that's a bit about
community maybe. I guess maybe, maybe they become like community after you
get together but everybody that comes into that group has, has some sort of deep
connection with nature.
Wendy and Kevin both emphasize the importance of community in many ways also beyond
schooling. Wendy told me,

All the different communities I've interacted with both human and more than
human have influenced how I live. The community of when I was guiding, the
community of the wilderness studies there in that area, but also the community
guides and humans that come into, and then the community when I did my
education degree…then my master’s degree and…I think there is, yeah, there is
the more than human community and the human community has influenced how
I act.
Kevin belongs to a small group that engages in interactive counselling and in many
discussions around environmental awareness. He credits community with offering support as
well as a venue for environmental activism,

One thing…my best friend, we would go out every week. We started to talk 5
years ago, about how we needed to start a civil disobedience organization to
make changes and we were kind of thinking it through in the late 2018,’s when
Extinction Rebellion turned up, so we thought, oh, we don’t have to do it alone!
…I think without a network, without a community, nothing’s gonna happen.
A final example of community involvement was given by Sarah, who described the
community growing around the development of a school garden in the school where she
works,

The latest thing that happened at work, in creating that garden…together we, we
um, created this amazing thing. We worked together and we grew stuff together
and we produced stuff together, if you know…that you can, that collectively one
can…create something quite unbelievable…

The aesthetic in ecological awareness

Five of the eight teachers responded to a prompt about how art has influenced the
development of their ecological awareness. Martin, Terry and Kevin all mentioned
photography, and specifically the desire to photograph nature as part of their nature
connectedness experience, and Terry spoke of writing poetry as well. Sarah did her master’s
degree in nature based arts and describes the affect that working with natural material had on
her, “I used wood…The other thing that I used was beeswax…it smelt beautifully, and I felt
very calm, …and I felt very engaged”.

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Wendy also mentioned the power of art to reach people, and that she would like to move
toward art based environmental activism.

Some of the later protests I was involved in were art based…so when we think
about how education is supposed to lead the people, supposed to meet our
students where they’re at, and I think art has a lot of potential to do that and to
communicate.
Besides mentioning art as a study or pastime, two respondents in particular referred
explicitly to the aesthetic beauty of nature as an instigation of ecological awareness.
Martin gave finely detailed visual descriptions of his nature experiences and concluded
that the beauty of nature was what appealed to him. Kevin also described the visual
beauty of the architecture of La Sacrada Familia, comparing it to nature.

In conclusion teachers’ stories indicate that in addition to the central and pervasive impact of
Access to Nature, Freedom and Timelessness, Solitude, and the Casual Mentor, there are
impacts of education and instruction, whether through formal education, books, or television,
on their growing ecological awareness. Most of these teachers point to larger communities
and the relationships within them as being instrumental, and some also include art as a
response to ecological awareness in their lives.

4.4 Reflections on teaching and schools

In the final section of my interviews, I asked teachers to reflect on how their development of
ecological awareness, set in contrast to the ‘standard social paradigm’ described in the
literature on the NEP and through my literature review, affected their interactions in schools.
Most of the teachers in the project had well developed ecological awareness when they
started teaching, although a few said it had grown in the years since. They were unlikely to
have made startling changes in the way they teach, and most tend to incorporate their
viewpoints into their teaching while adhering to the curriculum of the schools they teach in.
Martin remarked on the growing understanding of science with regards to climate change and
how that has impacted the amount of climate science he is able to teach. He says, “Now the
science backs up what you knew 15 years ago, so it changes the way you can go about
teaching your classes.”

One area of challenge to teachers revolves around inflexibility and rigidity among staff.
Fellow teachers who have done things one way for a long time often don’t see a need to
change. Another conflict is with hypocrisy among staff or administration, parents or students.
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Beth recalls her school, which teaches sustainability, throwing away plastic items after an
outing. Martin told stories of colleagues flying abroad for a weekend ski holiday, and
students whose parents would fly to England on shopping trips.

In some cases, position or degrees make it easier for teachers to make their own choices
about curriculum or teaching methods. For Brian, who is a contact teacher, his position as
main curriculum person for his class means that he is able to make many decisions about
what happens in his classroom. As he works in an alternative school, he also believes that the
culture of the school is already outside of the mainstream, making it easier to adapt to new
ideas, whereas “if you work in a regular school where the voice of the culture is quite strong,
then you might not have as much space to work with that.”. Terry, as well, says that
although other teachers may be surprised at the way he teaches, the fact that he has degrees in
science allow him the status and credibility to do as he pleases.

I discovered that two of the eight teachers I had arranged to speak with had left or sharply
reduced their hours in the schools they taught in, and five will have left by the summer this
thesis is complete. For one, this is because of a personal decision that it is time to move on;
for the others this was directly related to their consternation regarding working in schools and
becoming aware of impending ecological crisis. Beth felt that her school was not living up to
its ideals. Martin feels the population of his school is too affluent and that the administration
is hypocritical about wanting to confront environmental and ecological issues. He reckons he
has taught nearly 3,000 students and that “only a small percentage have changed”. He refers
to his “increased sense of dread” and the difficulty of teaching in the face of climate change:

Climate change is a difficult thing to teach about because it happens so slowly. I

use the idea of the roller that slowly builds up steam and in the beginning, you
think you can walk in front of it and then by the time you realize it's trying to go
fast it's going to roll over you and we're sort of at that (point) where it’s picked up
enough speed and we're thinking, “oh that thing looks like it's starting to move
quickly- maybe we should do something.” Ultimately, it's probably too late for us
to do anything and that's difficult for, that's difficult teaching. It’s also difficult
for people to hear.
Wendy is burnt out by paperwork and curricular restrictions; she is contemplating other types
of work that target environmental awareness and reach teachers and students without the
administrative constraints. She comments,

We’re so structured. Nothing is natural. It became a bit more natural with covid
and getting to stay home - we didn't have to force ourselves up as much and we
could go to the toilet when we wanted to. We could press ‘mute’ and get up and
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 go get a glass of water without interrupting other people, but this is so…just the
structure, the lack of freedom…the structure and the administration, the
paperwork, the head stuff rather than the experience stuff and the connectedness.
Kevin has reduced his course load in order to concentrate on environmental activism. A
primary school teacher, he says, “We can’t wait for the 10-year-olds to be voting because I
can’t help thinking how uncomfortable their lives are going to be.” He adds,

maybe we need to create some conflicts, need to create situations where we

create, where we get sacked, so we are actually creating conflict situations which
result in debate. If I am going back to teaching, I have to be a rebel teacher and
say I’m sorry this is hard, but this is something that really has to happen…there is
a lot of silence at school which is very uncomfortable for me, but not as
uncomfortable as the children’s lives are going to be.

4.5 The way forward

Given the level of conflict most teachers face in reconciling their ecological awareness and
worldviews with the standard social paradigm and their schools, I wanted to know how they
reflected on the ways schools might develop ecological awareness among students. Here,
they often referred back to their own upbringing, ecological awareness experiences, or to the
things they had done in school that they felt worked. The variety and nuance in their
reflections is important in that it highlights the myriad different recipes for ecological
awareness development.

Beth advocates schools adopting a forest or a river, following a watershed story in their area,
or becoming engaged in regenerative agriculture. She told of a time where her class had been
engaged in learning about different species, and each student had ‘adopted’ a specific species
to learn about.

One of the best activities that we did, we got in an expert…We were going to do
the food web in the area around our school and he said ‘I really recommend that
you have each kid choose one species…they all chose one thing, and…like he
said, if they can know one species really well they will see the relationships.
Brian said, “for me it all starts with love, because that’s the most important thing. If you
don’t have that, if you don’t love yourself then you can’t start to develop these aspects”. He
said that if you show children love, then they will know how to reciprocate that love, not
only to others but to the land. In his school, he describes how students interact with the land
to develop love and relationship:

In class 5 we go out and find a little patch…of ground that…we get to know it

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 and we go back every day and then two or three years later we come back to this
area and all the kids straight away they go running to their place, because, its
theirs, something they have developed a relationship to.
Mark takes pause at the question, says, “that is something I am trying to figure out myself…
I have questioned the idea myself whether or not we can change the perception.”, and then
finishes, “I don’t know, unless they feel connectedness…Feel nature”. Terry builds on this
theme,

Open their senses, only developing their own personal relationship with nature.
You can know, but then you need to feel. It all starts with the senses…It’s more
like they have personal experiences with the living world, and they not only
know that trees breathe out oxygen in the day but that they feel it…I came to the
conclusion that deep nature connection in individuals is the only thing that is
going to change.
Wendy refers back to her own experiences, saying “I think it’s unstructured freedom- the
ability to immerse ourselves without time constraints”, and Stacy refers both to contact with
nature as well as to empathy, while bringing up the importance of reading:

I think it’s contact with nature and with organisms and a development of a strong
empathy, I think are kind of recipe for ecological awareness…So, so simply
giving them experiences of nature as well as trying to foster a sense of a sense of
empathy and understanding of the natural world at the same time…and reading
books I think is really important- giving children the opportunity to be immersed
in other people’s stories is powerful at encouraging empathy.
Kevin admonishes schools to be honest about the climate crisis,

The other one is to talk about the reality of the situation. You want to tell students
so they…If we are telling them the truth, you don’t tell people the house is on fire
we have to put the fire out, it’s not going to be sitting in the classroom studying.
Finally, Sarah comes back to the idea that,

We are all not just separate, we are one, and that we, we, the way we teach our
children is to for them to understand about the whole, not to just understand a
section of the whole, if you know what I mean, so, when we are teaching a
particular topic or inquiring into something, that we show that thing’s position in
the whole in that sense but also refer to the whole.
In these suggestions and admonishments, a weaving of experiential ways of knowing
through nature contact, feeling and sensing looms large, as does the role of community.
Teachers emphasize the importance of developing empathy, exploring connectedness,
teaching about whole systems. They understand a need for addressing the truth about
the reality of the ecological crisis and feel the urgency to do so.

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Chapter 5: Discussion

5.1 Introduction
The research questions for this study are “What are teachers’ narrated life experiences
regarding the development of their ecological awareness”, “What are their reflections on how
their ecological awareness influences their world view, ethics, and interactions in schools?”
and “How can these stories and reflections be described, understood, and interpreted to
improve educational practice, and especially education for sustainability?”. In this section I
will discuss the findings in light of the conceptual framework of the study and the literature
review. Below I will first discuss the value and belief systems of the teachers with reference
to theories regarding the development of ecological awareness. Then I will discuss teacher
responses to the NEP, explore the pathways emerging from their narratives with reference to
the theory and empirical studies in the literature review, and finally engage with the teachers’
reflections on their interactions in schools, especially in comparison with the other empirical
studies cited in the literature review.

5.2 A nuanced ecological awareness

In the views of the teachers in this study, ecological awareness encompasses an
understanding of all living systems in relation to one another and thus is inherently
ecocentric. They professed the same values as the ecologists interviewed by Goodwin (2016)
and descriptions by Abram (2011), Capra (2005), Næss (2016) Orr (2004), Roszak (1995),
and Shepard (1998). Humans were described as co-equal to, and not above, the more than
human world, and in relation to and interconnected nature, which they do not perceive
themselves as separate from.

Despite a strong ecological awareness, teachers’ views differed substantially with some of
the views ascribed to an ecological paradigm by the NEP scale (Dunlap et al., 2000). Their
universal agreement that ‘Plants and animals have as much right as humans to exist’ (NEP
question 7) and that humans are still subject to the laws of nature (NEP question 9), matches
what Goodwin (2016) found in his interviews with known environmentalists, especially that
humans are not more special than, or separate from other living beings, reflecting strong
cohesiveness in worldview. Interestingly teachers in this study also acknowledge that there is
a dichotomy between their known nature connectedness and the way they necessarily live
their lives, led them to feel less connected at times. It is clear that holding one world view
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while living in what the authors of the NEP call the Standard Cultural Paradigm creates a
sense of dichotomy or alienation for these teachers, and this will come up again when
discussing their reflections on their work in schools.

Teachers’ nuanced responses to the questions on the NEP (Dunlap, et al., 2000) demonstrate
a reflectiveness that the scale itself is not able to reflect quantitatively. The observation of
several respondents that humans have lived for millions of years without destroying their
environment and that all organisms modify their environment to one extent or another reveal,
I think, an implicit bias in the questionnaire, an assumption that the questions are in the
context of this modern developed society and that we might all agree on a more rigid
definition of words like ‘modify’. The writers of the scale intended that respondents with
highly developed ecological awareness would place these highest, at 5 on the scale, yet these
teachers did not do this, not because they had a lower degree of ecological awareness, but in
fact, as their discussions of their responses reveal, because they had a more developed
awareness that allowed for a wider and deeper interpretation of words such as ‘humans’
‘modify’ and ‘destroy’. In responding to the statements in a deeply reflective way, teachers
highlighted the weaknesses of the scale. This calls into question the efficacy of the NEP as a
tool for measuring ecological awareness when it is used quantitatively with individuals who
have well developed paradigms of ecological awareness. At the same time, I believe using
the NEP and other ecological or nature connectedness scales qualitatively, as was done in
this study, allowed for discussion that gave evidence for the strong ecological awareness of
the teachers in this study.

5.3 The accretive nature of ecological awareness

In the light of discussions by Orr (2004), Roszak (1995), and Shepard (1998), on the innate
nature of ecological awareness, and of Harding’s (2016) discussion of sudden profound
ecological encounter leading to deep ecological understanding, one of my questions to
teachers was whether they regarded their current ecological mindset as something that had
always been there or had developed over time. All of the respondents said that they felt their
ecological awareness had evolved although they mentioned more sense of connection when
young. This does not disprove that our connectedness to nature is an innate drive and neither
does it disprove Harding’s (2016) claim that profound experiences can immediately change
their perception. However, it does support the idea that there are many small incidences of
many different types, often from early childhood, that can lead to ecological awareness. I
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propose that an attachment to life, which Orr (2004) terms biophilia, is present at a young
age. In this, it may be somewhat like language, an innate proclivity but one that also requires
a series of important inputs in order to develop fully. Like language, there may be a time in
childhood where the conditions to develop nature connectedness and then ecological
awareness are most ripe. Although this does not mean that biophilia cannot develop later, it
does mean that if possible, the earlier opportunities should be seized. Given how all the
teachers in this study reflect on profound experiences in nature from a young age as an
instigator of their ecological awareness, I would argue that it is very important to provide
these experiences to children. Orr (2004) would support this claim, as he says, it is also
possible for us to develop biophobia, or an aversion to the natural world, if our biophilia is
not well developed as a child (Orr, 2004).

5.4 Pathways toward ecological awareness.

5.4.1 Reviewing pathways toward ecological awareness.

All of the ways of knowing described by Harding (2016) were instrumental in the
development of ecological awareness for this group of teachers, but there is new evidence of
the types of awareness each may generate and what interactions may exist. Here, I will
discuss experiential, intellectual, aesthetic and existential pathways, and the involvement of
these in the development of teachers’ ecological awareness.

Experiential pathways: sensing and feeling in nature contact.

Teachers’ stories of sensual and emotional responses to nature clearly confirm Young et al.’s
(2010) and Abram’s (2011) contention that attunement to the sensory body is an important
prelude to understanding our connectedness to the more than human world. Perceptual and
commitment changes in response to emotions such as grief and overwhelm reflect Macy and
Johnstone’s (2012) work. Notably, care for pets created a strong emotional connection to
nature, not mentioned specifically in literature and instrumental in the development of
empathy. This indicates one does not have to be engaged with wild nature in order to
experience connection with the more than human world. Respondents tended to have either a
preponderance of either sensual or emotional descriptions in their stories. It may be that this
indicates a proclivity toward one or another way of knowing, such as Harding (2016)
describes.

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Aesthetics and art as an expression of the experiential pathway.

Although several teachers enjoy artistic pursuits, art itself was an activity chosen because of
their love for nature rather than a pathway to ecological awareness. Considering the large
number of empirical studies (Flowers, et al., 2014; Michaels, 1995; and Reed, 2015) in which
art was used as a pathway to ecological awareness, I found this surprising. It could also be
that the types of artistic experiences described by Flowers, et al. (2014) and Michael (1995),
and confirmed by artistic experiences of this studies’ participants, are instrumental because
they allow participants to access other ways of knowing or attend to new perceptions, rather
than the art itself being the main propulsion of ecological awareness development. Also, the
empirical studies by Flowers, et al. (2014) and Michaels (1995) made use of art in an
instructed method- this might make it more accessible as an expression of senses and
emotion. In this way, artistic experiences might be more of a tool or an enhancer in
developing new values and perception, and again, certain individuals might have more
propensity to be influenced by these than others. Gersie et al.’s (2014) argument for
storytelling to develop ecological awareness is an artform that was not discussed by
participants. Nevertheless storytelling imbues the entire study, as it was the teacher’s stories,
told in oral form, that ran as a constant theme through the work. This may partially confirm
Gersie et al.’s (2014) call for oral storytelling to promote ecological awareness.

Intellectual pathways and the importance of ecological studies.

Intellectual experiences, specifically reading, and education were instrumental in the

development of teachers’ ecological awareness, supporting assertions by Goodwin (2016),
Howard (2012), and Raus (2018). Reading, and even nature programs or science podcasts,
can stimulate a desire to spend time in or contemplate connectedness to nature. Reading was
specifically important for young people at an age where they are creating identity and
deciding on their lives. In this way reading might even be considered a type of mentoring by
book, or author. Master’s courses, especially courses in ecology or environment, that allow
for experience in nature, include teachings by indigenous teachers or direct instruction in the
interconnectedness of the living world, were important to both developing an understanding
of ecological relationships and to teachers establishing legitimacy in their fields. This
confirms Raus’ (2018) findings for the effect of direct teaching on pre-teachers’ development
of ecological identity. Teacher’s stories support the need for good science instruction for

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youngsters and the importance of Masters’ courses in ecology for teachers, those that offer an
ecocentric or indigenous point of view.

Existential pathways and the quality of solitude.

Intuitive experiences appear to be a synthesis of experiential and perhaps intellectual ways of

knowing experienced in connection with the natural world, heightened by solitude. This both
confirms Harding’s (2016) description of intuitive knowing and adds some definition to the
phenomena. The role of solitude in developing profound ecological awareness and in
provoking sensory, emotional, and intuitional experiences in nature was one of the strongest
themes running through the stories of the teachers in this study, confirming Abram’s (2011)
call for developing senses in nature as well as mirroring White’s (2009) experiences. Stories
of solitude were connected to new understandings of the intricacy of life, sudden euphoric
feelings of wholeness, changes in perception, or encounters with the more than human world.
Being an only child or experiencing time alone while young could influence whether these
experiences happened at a younger age.

Solitude created conditions in which these teachers could attune to nature without distraction.
In many cases this led to profound experiences of an intuitive nature. These solo experiences
have had some of the deepest and lasting influences on participants’ worldview, perception,
and understanding of connectedness with the more than human world. The quality of solitude
in natural settings allows for the full use of the senses and for deep expressions of feeling.
Without the interference of other human interaction, the beingness of the more than human
world becomes clear, and we are more able to interact with non-human others, thus
provoking intuitional experiences of encounter and transformation.

Thus, teachers’ stories indicate that intuitive experiences are promoted by the experiential,
accessing our sensual and emotional knowing in nature, and perhaps also after intellectual
stimulation through scientific or environment studies, listening to podcasts or viewing nature
programs, and enhanced by solitude. This consolidation of pathways furthers Harding’s
(2016) analysis by demonstrating some connections between pathways, and by confirming
solitude as an important condition for an intuitional event to occur.

5.4.2 Unfettered access to nature and the quality of timelessness

The importance of access to nature is discussed at length in the literature, and especially in
Louv’s (2006) and Orr’s (2004) call on schools and parents to develop more time outdoors
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and in natural settings. What also became clear through the interviews was the importance of
everyday open access to nature at and near home. The most salient features of teachers’ time
in nature was its freedom. Also notable was the lack of supervision in many of these
experiences. Freedom from structure and supervision in these natural environments created a
sense of timelessness which is akin to Ull’s (2013) kairos time, Aerts’ (2019) discussion of
aeon time, and White’s (2009) phenomenological exploration, in that all recognize the
quality of timelessness in nature. The importance of these free and unstructured experiences
for the teachers in this study highlights the question of how available unfettered access to
nature is in this day and age, with electronics always at hand, with a rise in insecurity and
with wild nature increasingly further and harder to access. School trips to parks, or even
weeks of camp are not the same as some of the completely free situations described by these
teachers, where they would roam freely. Nevertheless, there is evidence that even supervised
access to nature was beneficial, as when accompanied by parents or adult friends or in camp
situations, as advocated by Louv (2006) and Orr (2004) and Young, et al.(2010), indicating
that although the unfettered access to nature is important, any access is better than none.

5.4.3 Community and the casual mentor

Community was a predominant instigator of ecological awareness across the cohort of

teachers in this study. Additionally, a factor mentioned by all the teachers in the study was
the role of specific individuals at important times in their lives.

The community developed through nature clubs, study or social groups and masters
education programs was important in providing a cohort of like-minded fellows. The most
important and influential persons were those who were instrumental in forming ecological
awareness by example. These casual mentors were not engaged in direct instruction yet
nevertheless imparted values or provoked changes in perception. Often, these people came
into the teachers’ lives when they were children. In this way they are emblematic of what Orr
(2004) terms the caring adult.

However, the mentoring revealed in this study could come from a peer or, at an older age,
from a casual mentor who might demonstrate an idea, inspire a new perception, or guide in
decision making. In this way the concept of casual mentor falls between Louv’s (2006)
concept of adults accompanying children in nature, Young et al.’s (2010) mentoring and
Moroye’s (2009) concept of complementary curriculum. Like Louv (2006) and Young

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(2010) these casual mentors often interacted in natural environments and with the more than
human world, though this was not always the case. Like Moroye’s (2009) examples, the
casual mentor’s influence “emerged naturally” (p.3), as “potentially subtle manifestations of
the participants’ beliefs and intentions” (p. 4), and as the “embedded and often unconscious
expression of…beliefs” (p. 4). Unlike Moroye’s (2009) study however, these casual mentors
were not always in prescribed institutional settings such as schools and also may not even be
particularly intentional in their actions; they may be simply living their own ecological
understanding in a time and place that is accessible to the mentee who is also receptive at the
same moment.
It is possible for a teacher to be a casual mentor, but as with the types of complementary
curricular examples given by Moroye (2009), it would be outside the written curriculum, in
an ungraded situation, and also perhaps, like Louv (2004) and Young (2010), most impactful
out of doors, although casual mentoring opportunities might arise at any time. In schools with
access to natural surroundings, where children can be given more time to explore on their
own, the teachers who act as casual mentors, not infusing situations with instruction but
allowing children and young people access time and space for solitude (Aerts, 2019), can be
instrumental in helping others to access nature connectedness.

5.4.4 Summary of pathways toward ecological awareness

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the eight participants in this study all exhibited several different
pathways toward their ecological awareness over the course of their lives. Early experiences
set the stage for later ecological awareness, but the depth of awareness at any one time in
one’s life may vary.

Importantly, different types of experiences fostered different types of awareness. I see four
important takeaways. First, the stories that my participants told about casual mentoring as
well as reading, (something we might recognize as books as mentor), revealed that these
relationships foster realizations or understandings that are instrumental in the perceptions
they develop or decisions they take. Second, instructional interactions foster structure,
method, and foundations of knowledge, sometimes as support to what has already been
experienced in nature or casual mentoring, but other times providing completely new
knowledge. Third, sensual and emotionally connected time in unfettered nature, evokes
timelessness, and particularly with solitude, is more likely to foster deep profound sensual

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and intuitional experiences. Finally, a community of like-minded individuals offers
confirmation to the development of emerging awareness.

5.5 Interactions and relationships in schools.

The complicated relationship between ecologically minded teachers and their interactions in
schools was confirmed in this study, and made surprisingly clear by the number of
participants who have or are opting to leave their schools or education altogether. Howard’s
(2012) assertion that teachers “question whether education in its current form, may be an
obstacle to realizing sustainable communities” (p. 6), was reflected by comments from
teachers in the study on perceived inflexibility, hypocrisy, overstructured curriculum, and
administrative restrictions. Expressions of fear and dread about the future and reflections that
change is too slow while the ecological threat is urgent and immediate, also reflect Wright’s
(2013) teacher reflections that an ecological method of teaching is crucial and yet it is
difficult without a structural and curricular support from the school. Nevertheless, in talking
about their actual teaching, the cohort in this study also became animated, as did those in
Wright’s (2013) study. They gave examples of what they had done in schools, from outdoor
nature connection exercises to exploring the flora and fauna in the area, to watershed studies,
to starting school gardens. In several instances the work of teachers affirmed Moroye’s
(2009) theory of the complementary curriculum, where they naturally include their ecological
beliefs and mindsets in their teaching or in their guidance and suggestions of activities.

Considering the good work these teachers describe in schools, it is disheartening that for half
of the eight teachers surveyed, the stress of conflicts between their ecological mindset and
the policies and practices in schools, as well as the urgency of the problem, was specifically
mentioned as a reason for leaving. It might be instructive to look at the teachers staying to
see how their experiences in schools might differ. In fact, of the three teachers staying, the
autonomy or community they have in their school is highlighted. This autonomy may be due
to an administrative position, a role in a smaller school, or the ability to act as a consultant
outside of traditional teacher employment. This suggests that if the relationship with
administrators and the school community is positive and teachers have the ability to shape
the content of their curriculum, this brings necessary autonomy and connectedness. This
appears to both validate Hwang’s (2008) assertion that teachers were more likely to advocate
for environmental awareness when they had a supportive community, and Wright’s (2013)
finding that teachers found it easier to introduce content in schools with an “agenda of
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ecological understanding” (p. 11). It also highlights the importance of autonomy in
developing content and practices that further ecological awareness.

The pressure on ecologically minded teachers to affect change in their schools and in society
is a clear issue, especially if schools continue to lose good teachers with strong ecological
awareness. The dilemma that teachers face and their dread and urgency for change is real and
reflects the calls of Goodwin (2016); Hadzigeorgiou & Skoumios, (2013); Howard (2012);
and Jorgenson (2011) for systemic change in schools toward an ecocentric values and
ecological awareness.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

6.1 Conclusion of the research

In this section I will revisit the research questions to ascertain how they are answered in the
presentations, findings and discussion.

In addressing the first research question, “What are teachers’ narrated life experiences
regarding the development of their ecological awareness?”, I found that teachers’ stories
offered clear and detailed accounts of what they felt had influenced their ecological
awareness. In addition, the researcher’s presentations of fictional analysis by narrative
consolidated multiple events to present the emotional and sensual richness of these accounts
in a holistic portrayal of the participants’ experiences through their lives. These two
approaches to the inquiry confirmed the teachers’ development of ecological awareness
through intellectual, experiential, and existential pathways presented in the literature as well
the need for contact in nature, also acknowledged in the literature review. At the same time,
the narratives and stories offered some new insights, namely the link between solitude and
existential transformation, the importance of unrestricted time, the role of casual mentors,
and the importance of ecological studies in addition to the other experiential pathways.

Addressing the question “What are these teacher’s reflections on how their ecological
awareness influences their world view, ethics, and interactions in schools?”, I found that
teacher’s world views were strongly ecocentric, especially with regard to the intrinsic worth
of all life, and to their view that humans are not different from or independent from the
natural world. In the interviews, teachers told stories of their developing ecological ethics
and the changes in behavior they had made personally as a result, from diet to travel to
activism. The world view they have developed sees humans as part of the rest of nature,
leading to a more empathetic view of the human species overall, although they recognize the
harmful role of the current pervading culture on the natural world. Teachers also reflected on
emotional changes as a result of their developing world view, in empathy but also grief and
dread. They described positive ways their ecological awareness affected their teaching in
schools, citing projects they have worked on with students, yet several also recounted stories
of frustration, hypocrisy, or rigidity in their schools, and some stated that they were leaving
teaching because of their need to do more about the ecological crisis than they felt could be
done in schools they taught in. Here their reflections provide empirical evidence of the toll

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the ecological crisis is having on ecologically minded teachers in schools that have not
developed ecocentric values and ethics.

In answer to the third research question, “How can these stories and reflections be described,
understood, and interpreted to improve educational practice, and especially education for
sustainability?”, I found that teachers shared their own reflections on recommendations for
improving educational practice toward ecological awareness and sustainability in schools.
They reflected on how more unstructured time in nature, the development of the senses and
of empathy through nature connectedness and also through connections to literature, and
teaching directly about integrated natural systems, are instrumental in developing ecological
awareness in schools. In addition, I understand teachers’ descriptions of their ecological
awareness to demonstrate ecocentric ethics and values whose adoption in schools can
improve educational practice. Teachers’ stories of their own development of ecological
awareness can be interpreted as transferable in educational settings, leading to change in
schools toward the types of experiential, intellectual and existential experiences they have
had and including more freedom and access to nature in community, with casual mentors,
and in solitude. Finally, the unease teachers reflect on in their interactions in schools can be
interpreted as a need for more autonomy and support to ecologically minded teachers. There
are several implications to be made from these observations, which will be discussed in this
chapter.

6.2 Study evaluation: quality, limitations and recommendations

6.2.1 Quality

This thesis developed into a fairly large and sometimes difficult to manage inquiry. I found
myself pulling threads from many different directions, and the more I pulled, the more
threads revealed themselves. I can be accused of having fallen deeply into a research
labyrinth where every path leads in new directions. I needed to work hard and under the good
advice of my supervisor and critical friends to constantly bring myself back to my starting
point, which was my three research questions. I was, however, constantly aware of what
questions I wanted to answer, and have in that sense, endeavoured to weave the many threads
back into a cohesive whole that does in fact, answer these questions.

Given that I have a clear ecological stance and have researched teachers’ ecological stances,
positionality was an issue I needed to be consistently aware of. I have taken the position of an
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“insider” (Holmes, 2020) in the discussion of school’s promotion of sustainability, which
carries both advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantages of an insider position are
that my interactions may be inherently biased, resulting in “an inability to bring an external
perspective to the process” (Holmes, 2020, p. 6). I have sought to remedy this with attention
to reflexivity, and also agree with Holmes (2020) that insider/outsider exists on a continuum
and can vary by topic. In fact, even as an “insider” I often found myself surprised by new
ideas and perspectives from my participants and stretched toward new understandings. The
main advantages of an insider stance were that I understood the positions and many
experiences of my participants and established an easy rapport. My own experiences as a
teacher allowed me to empathize with teacher reflections. I was aided in this by the excellent
engagement and beautiful stories of the teachers who participated with me in exploring the
development of their ecological awareness. I found that the method outlined by Wengraf
(2001) and the constant nudge of Kim (2016) to open myself to try new methods and
approaches strengthened the findings overall. I stayed close to my conceptual framework in
analysing and discussing my findings, yet nevertheless was open to and surprised by new
insights. Although these may not all be ground-breaking, I believe they add to the quality of
this study, offer insights on how ecological awareness is developed, and opportunities for
further research.

6.2.2 Limitations and recommendations

There were several limitations to this study. The eight teachers in my sample described their
own experiences and points of view, so the data is limited to their own interpretations of
events in their lives, and to my interpretations. Since I had chosen participants on the basis
that they were ecologically minded, they and I were already predisposed to the topic and this
can set up one-sided results. Particularly when they were talking about their interactions in
schools, this was a limiting factor since I did not interview any colleagues or administrators.
I could have focused a study on one school and developed group interviews to get more
information on multiple interactions within a school.

Among the eight teachers there was a range of subjects taught, both genders in equal
measure, and a variety of schools represented. However, none of my teachers were novices;
this gave them all long years of experience but may influence the burnout that many of them
felt. I had some chances to interview other teachers that I missed due to a covid lockdown in
Fall 2020 and restrictions on travel; they might have added other dimensions to the findings
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and conclusion. I could also have done a study with teachers at random, which would have
yielded very interesting results and a chance to make more comparisons. I was limited by
conducting interviews in English since it restricted the sample I could choose. In the end only
two out of the eight subjects worked in Norwegian state schools. This offered a variety of
types of schools represented but I would have liked to have more teachers from state schools
since I was reviewing elements of the Norwegian curriculum.

There are some limitations due to the methodology chosen, as narratives are subjective to the
tellers and the researcher is also a subjective interpreter. Nevertheless, the richness and
engagement of the participants led to strong narrative stories and therefore covered topics
and concepts that might not come to light in less intimate methodologies, such as surveys or
even focus groups. I often found it difficult to reduce the richness of my respondents’
biographies, deep feelings, and lively descriptions to the thematic analysis. Memories and
their interpretations are made out of whole cloth, woven through each other in and out of
time; memory is not chronological, but interconnected and accessed through emotional and
sensual contexts. For this reason, I believe the addition of analysis by narrative at the
appropriation stage of interpretation was important to adding depth to the analysis. One
could argue either that the research could have been more analytical or more intuitive and
interpretive; both would be correct. I could have conducted the study through only the semi-
structured interviews and thematic analysis, and likewise I could have approached it as a
more fully conceived arts-based research; both of these approaches would have offered
different value to the study, and limited it in different ways.

6.3 Contributions
The contributions of this thesis can be categorized as theoretical, methodological, and
empirical.

Theoretically, I believe this research adds an ecocentric stance to the discussion of ecological
and environmental awareness in schools. Another theoretical contribution is to open
discussion about the use of the quantitative surveys to measure ecological awareness. The
research develops a theory around how ecological awareness is developed, suggesting ways
that various intellectual and experiential pathways connect to influence intuitional or
transformational experiences. Findings offer depth and further dimension to the concepts of
solitude, timelessness and mentoring, introducing a concept of casual mentoring, confirming

92
the experience of timelessness and emphasizing the importance of solitude in developing
ecological awareness. The study also confirms theoretical notions of the importance of
instruction in ecoliteracy and the contribution of community practices.

Methodologically, the research contributes analysis by narrative to the body of narrative

research into teacher’s ecological experience. I believe that conceiving analysis by narrative
as a component of appropriation in thematic analysis adds interesting dimensions to both
approaches. This study promotes the use of storytelling, especially oral storytelling, as a
method for accessing one’s own ecological awareness and for presenting it to others. The
research method also offers an amendment to Wengraf’s (2008) biographic narrative
interpretive method with the use of written biography instead of two extended interviews. I
believe this amendment was very useful from a research standpoint since it made the method
more feasible without violating the basic principle of a first collection of the participants’
biographies with as little interference from the researcher as possible.

Finally, the research adds empirical evidence to the question of how ecological awareness
can be developed. The data was gathered in the voices of teachers themselves, literally giving
them a voice in describing how their ecological awareness developed. These gave empirical
evidence that confirmed several pathways toward ecological awareness, but also contributed
to studies of the relationship between teachers and schools, and lent credence to the need for
changes in schools that will support ecologically minded teachers and the development of
ecological awareness in schools. The research also lends empirical evidence to the
importance of oral storytelling in enhance ecological awareness, both in accessing one’s own
stories and in sharing stories for others to hear.

6.4 Implications and directions for future research

6.4.1 Implications for ecological awareness development

The findings in this thesis lead me to believe that the development of ecological awareness is
not impossible, and that it might be closer than we think. There are many pathways that can
help teachers to develop ecological awareness, even as adults, and especially though
emotional and sensory connection to nature with time for reflection in solitude. Teacher
training and graduate programs can be instrumental in using these pathways to help teachers
access and develop their own ecological awareness. Helping teachers to access their own

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stories of nature connection can help ignite or reignite understandings about the role of
humans in the wider natural world.

6.4.2 Implications for education

Even though this is a small study with a limited number of participants, I believe teacher’s
reflections in this study offer some implications that can be taken to heart by schools and
educational programs. Teachers’ experiences may be worth considering and emulating, and
listening to the stories and reflections of teachers who hold ecological views can help schools
to consider what may influence the values and ethics of students.

These teachers’ reflections imply that there are more avenues toward the value changes
needed to develop sustainability in the world than via instruction. Students can be guided
toward new ecological understandings and values for sustainability by teachers who hold
these views themselves. It is also important to change the narrative that vilifies humans as
‘destroying the earth’; investigations of early and current societies that live in harmony with
the natural world and of current developments toward a sustainable ecocentric and
regenerative mindset can be emphasized. Schools can allow for the incorporation of many
different ways of knowing, with sensory and affective experiences in nature, as part of the
development of deeper ecological awareness. Certainly one suggestion for schools is that
more outdoor time of any kind, with as little structure and as much freedom for exploration
as possible, with ecologically minded casual mentors, is beneficial to developing ecological
awareness. Schools can help children to find safe access to nature and to the deep sensual and
emotional worlds that are available there. Perhaps there could be more accommodation for
solitude, and especially solitude in nature, in schools.

I believe if we listen to the feelings expressed by teachers in this study, that schools need to
acknowledge the ecological crisis and existential threat facing our world, starkly described
by UN reports and scientists, which have an emotional impact on students and teachers alike.
Many teachers who become ecologically aware will feel grief and even dread, as these
teachers noted. Schools can open this discussion, embrace the work of ecologically minded
teachers, and offer them support while considering changes to curriculum that can support
ecological grief as well as ecological awareness.

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6.4.3 Directions for further research

Considering that schools are keen to initiate sustainability programs, the study of how
teachers’ ecological awareness can be developed is ripe for further research. One type of
study that could be considered is to continue a narrative research approach and engage more
teachers in telling their stories of ecological awareness development. Studies that include a
wider range of participants, from administrators to parents, to board members, and even
students, would be welcome. Action research that looks at the effects of a program designed
to optimize pathways toward ecological awareness through experiential, intellectual or
existential experiences, specifically with teachers, could also further develop the themes
pointed out in this thesis. The issue of teacher’s emotional health with regard to ecological
awareness could be studied in more detail. Similarly, the conflict teachers feel they face
between their worldviews and the schools they work in is an area that should be researched,
especially with a view to limit the loss of ecologically minded teachers in schools.

6.5 Researcher reflections

Re-storying our connectedness to the natural world

The stories told by teachers in this project revealed a way of being and knowing in the world
that is not part of our common conversation. In the first interview I thought the stories were
unique, but by the eighth I realized that we were together unpacking meaning and experience
that others may have as well, of childhood ramblings, social interactions, or moments of
solitude in nature. Voicing these stories makes them more accessible in the everyday tumult
of a world largely disconnected from nature. I wonder if retelling them is one way of
restoring, or re-storying, our connectedness to the natural world. Indeed, telling or hearing
stories of others’ nature connectedness may be a foundation for creating access to ones’ own
ecological awareness and can be instrumental in prompting change in schools. Certainly,
having heard these stories has changed me; they now reside in me in a way that causes me to
look at a bird, waterfall, or even a stand of reeds, a red cabbage, or a trout, differently. This, I
think, is the real power of story.

A new story

Perhaps the evocative stories and nuanced responses from teachers in this study can be seen
to weave together a holistic answer to our question of how ecological awareness might be
developed; a new story for schools. In a nested model, we might see empathy as the
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overriding quality, fostered through direct immersion into nature, including interaction with
animals and other more than human creatures. This can also be supported by rich reading and
by the storytelling of teachers’ and student’s own nature experiences. Large amounts of time
outdoors and a reduction of time constraints allows for timelessness, solitude, and casual
mentoring. Within this emotional and sensual support framework, students are invited to
engage in working with various topics, where they develop both deep knowledge about
nature, including indigenous ways of knowing, and an understanding of wider whole
systems. Teachers and students are then able to face their own grief and dread with empathy
for the human predicament. Finally, in this context they develop enough awareness with
connectedness and love of the Earth to be able to receive the truth of the situation we are
currently in and the risks to the natural world. They can act courageously to the preserve the
human and more than human natural world.

What a story that would be!

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Appendixes

Appendix 1: NEP

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Appendix 2: Proposed interview guide
Section 1: establishing the subject’s ecological paradigm
1. You scored highly on the NEP in (these) areas. Could you please comment on this? You scored
unexpectedly high (or low) or in the middle in (these) areas. Can you comment on this?
2. In addition to the NEP there are other scales and measures of ecological awareness I would like to
include. Can you tell me a little about your reaction to these statements?
a. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in
themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the
usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes (Deep Ecology principles)
b, I often feel a sense of oneness with the world around me (emotional scale)
c. when I think of my life, I imagine myself to be a part of the larger cyclical process of living
(emotional scale)
e. Policies affecting basic economic, technological, and ideological structures must be
changed. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present (Deep ecology
principle)
3. Where would you place yourself on this scale and what is your reflection on it? (Nature
connectedness scale)

Section 2: pathways toward an ecological paradigm: Push for Pins

1. “You said [cue-phrase]. Can you remember a particular [event, experience]… how it all
happened”?
2. Would you say that you always perceived your relationship to the natural world the way you do
now, that there has been a gradual shift in your perceptions, or that there was a sudden shift at one
time?
3. Can you relate any stories of a time when new knowledge, study, reading or education led to a
shift in your beliefs, perceptions, values, or ethics regarding human relations with the rest of the
natural world?
4. Can you relate any stories of a time when an experience in nature evoked a response that
resulted in a shift in in your beliefs, perceptions, values, or ethics regarding human relations with
the rest of the natural world?
5. Are there artistic experiences that might have led to a shift in your beliefs, perceptions, values,
or ethics regarding human relations with the rest of the natural world?
6. How much do you regard interactions with a community to affect a shift in your beliefs,
perceptions, values, or ethics regarding human relations with the rest of the natural world?
7. Have you ever had a profound intuitional, spiritual, meditative, or other sudden realization that
led to a shift in your beliefs, perceptions, values, or ethics regarding human relations with the rest
of the natural world?
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8. Are there other profound experiences or encounters that you would like to relate?
9. In your estimation, what one thing is most responsible for the shift in your beliefs, perceptions,
values, or ethics regarding human relations with the rest of the natural world?
Section 3. Changes as a result of a shift in ecological awareness.
1. Have you changed as a result of your changing paradigm? Can you reflect on how?
2. Have you changed anything you do?
3. Have you changed as a teacher?
4. Has the shift in your perception or world view changed the way you teach or the content you
teach?
5. Has the shift in your perception or world view changed the way you design curriculum?
6. Has it changed your interactions with students, colleagues, or administration?
7. Can you tell any stories of your time in school, regarding your teaching or your interactions with
colleagues, that you feel are impacted by a shift in your ecological awareness?
8: Have you experienced conflict at school as a result of a shift in your ecological awareness?
Nb: This is a long list of questions but will be modified by the situation and the first two parts of the research,
ie the NEP and the narrative, so not all of these will be asked or followed up on. The first section is also meant
to be quick, allowing the subject to simply choose on a scale from one to five, as would be done on a regular
scaled questionnaire, but also allowing for reflection if this is needed.

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Appendix 3: Request for participation

Are you interested in taking part in the research project:

Teachers’ stories of development toward ecological awareness
This is an inquiry about participation in a research project where the main purpose is to gather
personal narratives about teachers’ development of ecological awareness and reflections on how
this has affected their teaching and interactions in schools.

In this letter I will give you information about the purpose of the project and what your participation
will involve.

Purpose of the project

The master’s thesis project will use a written biography and narrative interview to gather data on
teachers’ stories about their development of ecological awareness through time.

- A purpose of the study is to ascertain how ecological awareness might be developed.

-Another aim is to discover what affects the development of ecological awareness has on a teacher’s
thinking, values, and behaviour in the classroom and in schools.

The main research question is:

-What are the storied experiences of teachers regarding the development of their ecological
awareness and what are their reflections on how this has affected their teaching and interaction in
schools?

A secondary research questions is,

-Are there significant events a participant can refer to in describing the development of their
ecological awareness?

Who is responsible for the research project?

Rudolf Steiner University College is the institution responsible for the project.

Why are you being asked to participate?

Up to ten teachers have been invited to participate in a short survey (the New Ecological Paradigm
Scale) and to write short biographies with reference to the development of their ecological
awareness.

You are receiving this inquiry because you have indicated a willingness to participate and fit the
projects’ criteria.

-You have been referred by a colleague or other contact or have answered a general invitation
through your school.

- You are or have been a teacher in kindergarten or primary through secondary school.

-You have experienced that you have developed ecological awareness over time and that you are
willing to tell the stories about how this has developed.

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The researcher will select up to five participants who have written biographies to participate in an
in- person or electronic semi-structured interview. These participants will reflect a variety of type of
school, number of years of schooling, and years and subjects taught.

What does participation involve for you?

If you choose to participate in this project you will be asked to take a short 15 question survey and
write a one- or two-page biography with reference to the development of your ecological awareness.
You will be advised to not write longer than 45 minutes and to avoid revealing information on any
third person or any identifiable background information on schools or institutions . You will deliver
the survey and written biography to the researcher who will use it to identify some areas for further
questions.

You may then be asked to participate in a 45-minute semi-structured interview. In this interview the
researcher will ask you to elaborate on some of the stories from your biography in relation to your
teaching and interaction in school, again, while avoiding revealing identifiable background
information on people or places. Your answers will be recorded electronically, and all personal or
place data will be made anonymous.

Participation is voluntary
Participation in the project is voluntary. If you chose to participate, you can withdraw your
consent at any time without giving a reason. All information about you will then be made
anonymous. There will be no negative consequences for you if you chose not to participate or
later decide to withdraw.

Your personal privacy – how we will store and use your personal data

We will only use your personal data for the purpose(s) specified in this information letter. We will
process your personal data confidentially and in accordance with data protection legislation (the
General Data Protection Regulation and Personal Data Act).

• Only the researcher will have access to the personal data.

• The researcher will replace names, contact data and other identifying features (locations,
physical characteristics, or biological details) with pseudonyms.
• Contact details, lists of names and respective pseudonyms will be stored separately from
the rest of the collected data.
• The data will be stored on a personal passworded computer without connection to the
cloud or to any other computer.
• No personal information will be revealed in any emails or communication with anyone else,
in any drafts or any other texts sent electronically, or with any other access to any other
institutions or persons.
• Participants will not be recognizable in any publications, and only general information
referring to numbers of years teaching, the program taught, the years taught and
generalized experiences with pseudonyms will be included in published work.
• All quotations will be protected from personal revelations.

What will happen to your personal data at the end of the research project?

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The project is scheduled to end in June 2021. All personal data will be removed from the personal
computer at that time. All digital recordings will be deleted. All paper data will be shredded and
made into compost for the garden.

Your rights

So long as you can be identified in the collected data, you have the right to:

- access the personal data that is being processed about you

- request that your personal data is deleted
- request that incorrect personal data about you is corrected/rectified
- receive a copy of your personal data (data portability), and
- send a complaint to the Data Protection Officer or The Norwegian Data Protection
Authority regarding the processing of your personal data

What gives us the right to process your personal data?

We will process your personal data based on your consent. Based on an agreement with
Steinerhoyskolen, NSD – The Norwegian Centre for Research Data AS has assessed that the
processing of personal data in this project is in accordance with data protection legislation.

Where can I find out more?

If you have questions about the project, or want to exercise your rights, contact:

• Katharine Burke, and Rudolf Steiner University College via Yifan Sun.
• Our Data Protection Officer:
Harald Martinsen,

Brugata 7, 2380 Brumunddal,

Tel: 415 20 561, E-mail: harald@septer.no

• NSD – The Norwegian Centre for Research Data AS, by email:

(personverntjenester@nsd.no) or by telephone: +47 55 58 21 17.

Yours sincerely,

Project Leader

Katharine Burke

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 Appendix 4: Consent form
I have received and understood information about the project Teachers’ stories of
development toward ecological awareness and have been given the opportunity to ask
questions. I give consent:

 to participate in the New Ecological Paradigm survey

 to participate in writing a biographical narrative.
 to participate in a semi-structured interview.

I give consent for my personal data to be processed until the end date of the project, approx.
July 30 2021.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Signed by participant, date)

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Appendix 5: Instructions for NEP and biographical sketch
Instructions for the Survey and Biographical Sketch
Teachers’ Stories of Development toward Ecological Awareness
Here you will find instructions for the NEP(New Ecological Paradigm) survey and for
writing a biographical sketch on your own development of ecological awareness. This will
be followed by in in-person semi-structured interview between the two of us where you will
be able to give more details on both of these.
1. NEP Survey. This is the New Ecological Paradigm survey. Please read each statement
and indicate your agreement or disagreement with the position by placing a check under the
numbers 1-5 on the right. 1 indicates the least agreement, while 5 indicates the most. You
will have a chance to respond in more detail in the interview.
1 2 3 4 5
1. We are approaching the limit of the number of people the Earth
can support.
2. Humans have the right to modify the natural environment to suit
their needs.
3. When humans interfere with nature it often produces disastrous
consequences.
4. Human ingenuity will ensure that we do NOT make the Earth
unlivable.
5. Humans are severely abusing the environment.
6. The Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to
develop them.
7. Plants and animals have as much right as humans to exist.
8. The balance of nature is strong enough to cope with the impacts of
modern industrial nations.
9. Despite our special abilities humans are still subject to the laws of
nature.
10. The so-called “ecological crisis” facing humankind has been
greatly exaggerated.
11. The Earth is like a spaceship with very limited room and
resources.
12. Humans were meant to rule over the rest of nature.
13. The balance of nature is very delicate and easily upset.
14. Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works to
be able to control it.
15. If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience
a major ecological catastrophe.

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2. Biographical Sketch. Please write a biographical sketch of your life, approximately one
to two pages, with an emphasis on the development of your ecological awareness. You may
consider your own identity, background, situations, moments, events, places, or people or
other creatures who have contributed to the development of your ecological awareness as you
grew up and until now. However, in order to meet Norway’s data protection guidelines,
please avoid any specific names of people, places, institutions, or other identifiable or
discoverable information about yourself or others you mention. If you do inadvertently
include such information, it will be redacted from the text before the text is stored in a
secure One Drive vault that is only accessible to this researcher. All texts will be deleted at
the end of this research project.

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Appendix 6: Deep ecology principles
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEEP ECOLOGY George Sessions and Arne Naess, 1984
1. Inherent value The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value
in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the
usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Diversity Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are
also values in themselves.
3. Vital Needs Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital
needs.
4. Population The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of
the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
5. Human Interference The present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and
the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policy Change Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic,
technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different
from the present.
7. Quality of Life The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in
situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There
will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
8. Obligation of Action Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or
indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Næss (2016). P. 111.

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Appendix 7: Other scales used: Nature Connectedness Scale
Extended Inclusion of Nature in Self Scale

Nature Connectedness Scale

Please answer each of these questions in terms of the way you generally feel. There are no right or wrong
answers. Using the following scale, in the space provided next to each question simply state as honestly and
candidly as you can what you are presently experiencing.
____1. I often feel a sense of oneness with the natural world around me.
____2. I think of the natural world as a community to which I belong.
____3. I recognize and appreciate the intelligence of other living organisms.
____4. I often feel disconnected from nature.
____5. When I think of my life, I imagine myself to be part of a larger cyclical process of living.
____6. I often feel a kinship with animals and plants.
____7. I feel as though I belong to the Earth as equally as it belongs to me.
____8. I have a deep understanding of how my actions affect the natural world.
____9. I often feel part of the web of life.
____10. I feel that all inhabitants of Earth, human, and nonhuman, share a common ‘life force’.
____11. Like a tree can be part of a forest, I feel embedded within the broader natural world.
____12. When I think of my place on Earth, I consider myself to be a top member of a hierarchy that exists in
nature.
____13. I often feel like I am only a small part of the natural world around me, and that I am no more
important
than the grass on the ground or the birds in the trees.
____14. My personal welfare is independent of the welfare of the natural world.
Mayer S. F. & McPherson F. C. (2004).
Extended Inclusion of Nature in Self Scale

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Appendix 8: Sample of analysis and theme building
Naïve Structural analysis Combined
reading/understanding comprehension-themes
individual What and where How who Consolidated (bold)
Stacy Birdwatching with Out in nature Mom Mentoring
Happy cohesive mom
childhood with Learning in Teacher in
birdwatcher mom , Picking peas for school grade school Time in nature/ Time in
bicultural, lots of pets pocket change- out nature
and time outdoors in in fields Taking notes in a
countryside, liked notebook Teacher in Alone
school and teachers, School events- high school
science and biology, visiting the fishing Reading books
reading lots of books, village with nature
led to environmental Colleagues in Schooling,
studies, but Reading books Watching the nature trust.
disillusionment with stars-alone Reading
environmental Stargazing alone on
activism. Teaching island Studying Principal
science and doing environmental Intuitive experience
permaculture on own Studying science Oak tree Sensual experience
land. environment
Discovering the
Teaching oak tree
Activism
Martin What /where How Who
Middle class upbringing
permaculture
with family members Walks on Nature Hearing from Aunt- not real
environmentalists, reserve ‘aunt’- walking family but
spending time with among snakes family friend
Travel
them on walks, joining
and working and in Time at the lake in Time in nature-
scouts, then going to scouts in the scouts Girlfriend
girlfriends college
climbing the mountain, Hiking and
and with first wife Climbing the climbing Wife
climbing mountains mountain mountains-
and fishing in lakes and alone
hiking alone. Studied
science and ecology Hiking trails
and became a science Experience at
teacher Moving Driving to top of top of mountain
country and not feeling mountain
as close to nature. very
sensual descriptions of Studied ecology
experiences frustrated and science
in school, and dread Studying science
about future. and ecology

Nb: this shows just two of the participants’ thematic analyses- the entire 8 participants revealed the
full thematic consolidation which explains why some themes in common here, ie activism, were not
identified for the entire cohort. This sample also omits the last stage – appropriation, which for me
was synonymous with the arts-based fiction inquiry by narrative.

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Appendix 9: Examples from the reflection journal:

11/8
I have been thinking hard about what to do with the number of participants. Kim says
saturation, also quotes 10-12, says it depends on if you are doing a case study or looking at
a broader phenomenon. I am looking at a broader phenomenon, I knew when I started I
wanted to find trends, maps, generalities as well as personal biographies-

Some thoughts last night- there are 7 who have given their permission now- I really wish I
had S, and maybe will get that. I had 12 original yeses to the study, 1 could not get back to,
2 cancelled because of covid, 1 I cancelled myself due to covid and the number I already
had. I am a bit sorry to have done that as it was native Norwegian, older, filled gaps and
might have extended that ‘saturation’. Should I open it again? She was very willing. If S
comes though that will make 9. I need to start transcribing. 2 hours a day.

I was thinking that RSUC says 4 or 5 but I have evidence to suggest more, and 15+-10. So
10 is not bad. I also thought I can also see them presented as pairs, by personality type or
something….

11/21
Reflection on ethics, on interaction and co-creation, making sure the information is
clear. Making sure positionality is clear. Making sure who owns the story. Sharing the
stories.
Can we share the story as a pin drive? To take in nature and hear, or read aloud- to what
extent are these my stories, to what extent are they the teachers’ stories? Is there
something proprietary about reworking them? Isn’t the whole thesis a
reworking? Presenting findings in the traditional sense also picks and chooses, reorders, I
think that by offering them in a non-analyzed format it is perhaps even more true to the
experience? Are we trying to get back to the original experience, or its impact on the
participant?

12.13
How is my thematic coding true to the experience of the participants? I must necessarily
leave things out- things that are sometimes very dear to the participants telling them. Is
coding a kind of averaging, that minimizes outliers? Is that necessary and true? I started
out to tell teachers stories- I am not sure how the coding works toward that except to trim
excess, and the trimmings might be the most important part of an individual teacher’s
story. I need to be certain they are each represented, and not lost to the common.. Like, is
something important only because they all said it? Does that show some sort of universal
impetus, or if I only have 8, is it just chance? What is the point of coding then?
The coding makes certain elements, impetuses, stand out. The premise of much of the
thesis is how we develop ecological awareness. That is a ‘we’, and thus a distillation in
itself. It’s important that we recognize outliers in every situation, but there should also be
some conclusions that can forward theory, and theory is based on generalities. Is that
rightly so? Maybe, since if (when) we are working with groups we necessarily need to work
with generalizations and averages. The point is to do that while also leaving the work open
to the edges.

12.29.

I am seeing this as a holonic process - nesting within nesting. I hope that through the
findings plus the stories I am true to the participants. There are still a lot of things I end up
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leaving out. I chose today to leave out travel- it is K who mentioned travel as an impetus,
but he is the only one. The others travel, surely, but it doesn't seem to me to be central to
the development of awareness, in some cases it seems to be detrimental I started to write
about that dichotomy but then felt that it was not relevant to findings on awareness. K’s
mention of travel was almost incidental- ‘I have had the privilege of going to all these
places’. So if I include it as an example of a pathway to ecological awareness, am I saying
that we all should travel? That is so contradictory to understanding place, I think. I also
have to remember that this group is an anomaly in the sense that they are all displaced.

Displacement is a theme I should discuss somewhere. There is so much displacement in

the world today- western world anyway. This ties into Abram’s comments in the preface, of
that
Stories also migrate- are stories displaced? Can we replace them? Does it matter that we
do or can, if we learn to interpret them in our own place? This comes back to the theme of
universality- stories are place bound but they are all also connected by earth. Perhaps
displacement is also a way to connect to the wholeness, the wider earth?

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