Abstract
Education is crucial in addressing climate change and its impacts. Despite persistent challenges, teachers who educate students about climate change may have several experiences that influence them to strive for agency. This research focuses on temporal and relational factors influencing teachers’ agency in climate change education (CCE). Recognizing teacher agency is essential to help teachers and administrators understand how teachers cope with challenges and how teachers are aided and inhibited by their situation, which may strengthen CCE. Following the interpretative phenomenological analysis, the researcher divided the study into two phases: a descriptive online survey that filtered the teachers, for the next phase, which involved semi-structured interviews. After the data analysis, four superordinate themes emerged: (1) Historical situations theme, which are the past patterns of thought and actions incorporated into their routine activities in teaching climate change; (2) Future-oriented projections theme that involves drawing upon past experiences to structure thoughts of action concerning their goals for the future; (3) Response to challenges theme that concerns the teachers’ engagement in providing solutions to the current dilemmas in CCE; and (4) Interplay between the chordal triad of agency, which is the interaction between the teachers’ past, future, and present dimensions. The study presented no definite agents to achieve agency, only the teachers who were actively engaged with their environments. This implies that teacher agency is a response connected to situations in which teachers take authority in their lives and lead it in a more favorable direction due to a perceived sense of responsibility.
Presenters
Elijah Jesus De GuzmanStudent, Master of Science in Science Education, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Human Impacts and Responsibility
KEYWORDS
Climate Change Education, Teacher Agency, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
