Re-Coupling Nature and Culture: How Can Primary Teacher Educators Enable Pre-service Teachers and Their Pupils to Breathe Life Back into Humanity’s Tin Forests?

Abstract

Meeker (1972) has long observed the tendency of Western democracies to separate culture from nature in order to dominate it. West Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story and Encounters with the land. (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism), Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, (2007) asserts it is the estrangement of culture from nature that contributes to a separation between the conscious reason and the unconscious psyche, leading to an alienation of individuals from their environment. The long-term consequences of such detachment lie in wait for future generations of the Earth’s children. This paper reports the findings of a case study to explore how pre-service teachers’ conceptualisations of Education for Sustainable Development were mediated using the picture book The Tin Forest (Ward and Anderson in The Tin Forest, New York, Templar Publishing 2001) and the dramatic inquiry pedagogy The Mantle of the Expert (Bolton and Heathcote in So You Want to Use Role Play? A New Approach in How to Plan, Stoke-on-Trent, Trentham 1999) to contextualize a programme of cross-curricular teaching interventions facilitating links between sustainability, the humanities and arts, within a series of science workshops. Findings indicate when teacher educators model to pre-service teachers the use of a cross-curricular approach to pedagogical design (Brown and Edelson in Teaching As Design: Can we better understand the ways in which teachers use materials so we can better design materials to support their changes in practice? Evanston, IL, The Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools 2003) and curriculum-making they demonstrate there are multiple ways of knowing and presenting curricular content to facilitate a diversity of responses from pupils as artists, poets, creative writers, makers, musicians, dancers, scientists, mathematicians, stewards and guardians.