| Abstract |
In Greek research, problems and obstacles encountered by teachers in the implementation of Environmental Education programs have been documented, however solutions to address these problems have not been documented yet. At the same time, two new approaches to Environmental Education, Place-based Education and Urban Environmental Education, aren’t acknowledged in our country yet. Place-based Education is the process of using the local environment and community in teaching and learning, with the aim of developing students’ emotional bond to place, which may encourage them to preserve or improve their place. Important elements in this approach are the concepts of the sense of place, the place attachment and the place meaning. Urban Environmental Education is any Environmental Education that occurs in cities, where the most people, and students as well, live nowadays.
The purpose of this research was to investigate how primary school teachers, with experience in Environmental Education, overcome problems in Environmental Education, and whether they implement programs for the local environment and the city. This is a qualitative research with structured interviews with a deliberate sample of ten teachers. The questions were designed specifically for the purposes of the research and concerned four axes: a) teachers’ relationship with Environmental Education, b) whether they overcome the problems in Environmental Education and how they solve them c) the teachers’ place attachment (the place of school) and d) the thematology of the environmental programs they implement. We used thematic analysis for the teachers’ replies.
For the needs of this research, a literature research was carried out for teachers in our country. The purpose of the research papers we found was to record problems in the implementation of Environmental Education in primary school education. Thus, twelve research papers were found to address this issue. Regarding the teachers’ experience in Environmental Education, the sample was consisted of highly experienced teachers (over 20 years), intermediate (10-20 years) and little experience (less than ten years). As far as the sex is concerned, our sample was consisted of six males and four females. Regarding the place of the school, seven teachers are working in urban schools, while three teachers in rural schools.
Some indicative results of our research are below. Firstly, the teachers find solutions and overcome the problems in Environmental Education. Regarding the cost of the programs and its coverage, the teachers’ answers were associated with the type of Environmental Education they implement, according to the classification that has been done by Korfiatis & Paraskevopoulos. Hence, it seems that the teachers of the positivist model of Environmental Education spend the largest amounts of money to implement the programs (1000 €), but they have complex strategies to find this money. Teachers of the interpretative model spend intermediate amounts of money for programs (100-250 €), which are found by the community, the local voluntary groups, the parents or they put money themselves. Teachers of the critical model need a little money to implement their programs (0-20 €). Both bureaucracy and accidents, that can happen during a program, have not been problems for these teachers.
As far as the thematology of the programs for the place (Place-based Education), the programs, that these teachers have implemented, were categorized into local and global programs. All the teachers have done some programs for the place, such as the acorn forest of the village, the plants and the animals of the village, the herbal gardens of Crete, the natural environment of the place. These responses were then attempted to be related to the teachers’ place attachment (place of the school). All the teachers had a place attachment. However, the teachers who had a strong place attachment implemented more specialized thematology for the place.
Regarding the programs for the city (Urban Environmental Education), some teachers, who are working in urban schools, are implementing programs for the city, such as school gardens, the neighborhood park, an arid cultivation in urban environment , the canyon of the school. However although teachers recognize ecological elements in the urban environment, they do not implement programs for them. A typical example is the absence of the sea as a thematic of Environmental Education in a seaside city.
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