Colourful Nature and Grey Misery: Science and Technology in an ...

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This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education© 2010 copyright Taylor & Francis; Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14926150903574304

Colourful Nature and Grey Misery: Science and Technology in an Environmental Context as Analysed in Pictures Made by 11-13-YearOld Swiss Students

Albert Zeyer and Stefanie Kaegi, University of Zurich Abstract: We asked 408 11-13-year-old Swiss children to draw a picture of their choice about “the environment.” We were especially interested in how these children presented the role of science and technology in an environmental context. The qualitative content analysis of the pictures was complemented by the results of a survey that consisted of 15 environmental questions used in the ROSE study. Our students showed a clear preference for an ecological, ecocentric stance.

A colourful,

untouched, idealized nature represented a normative threshold for a desirable situation. Technology was pictured as an instrument of human alienation from nature creating a grey, hostile civilisation dominated by science and technology. We conclude that science education has the delicate task of introducing students to more scientific, fact-oriented, pragmatic thinking without destroying their ecocentric, valueoriented views on environmental protection, thus fostering a constructive approach towards science and technology as instruments for a sustainable co-existence of humans and nature.

Introduction and theoretical background The improvement of teaching and learning in environmental education is a central issue in the literature (Dillon & Scott, 2002). Situated, multi-disciplinary, and context-based learning should make environmental topics relevant to students and bring them into the classroom. To this aim, more research is needed on students’ conceptions of the environment and environmental protection. There are yet few, if any, studies of students’ conceptions of issues such as the greenhouse effect and the ozone hole (Fensham, 2001). However, if environmental education is to be considered in a science education context, then knowledge of students’ environmental conceptions is crucial to a successful teaching approach. This seems to be supported by cognitive (Duit & Treagust, 2003) and general educational (Kattmann, Duit, Gropengießer, & Komorek, 1997) points of view as well. In the context of this research, we favour a cultural point of view (Aikenhead, 2000), wherein students’ concepts are considered as part of their

cultural background. The teachers’ knowledge of students’ concepts is a prerequisite for successful cultural negotiation. In this study, we asked 11-13 year-old Swiss children on an environmental outdoor excursion to draw a picture of their choice based on “the environment.” We were especially interested in how these children would describe the relation between environment and science and technology. Our interest was prompted by results from our previous research, wherein we had analysed the discourse of 15-16 year-old students on the environment and environmental protection (Zeyer & Roth, 2009). These students had talked in a way that could be regarded at face value as conveying an active orientation toward materialism and hedonism and thus as opposing the ideals of a Green culture. Our analysis however – using so-called discursive repertoires – showed that this talk was first and foremost a reaction to a lost locus of selfcontrol in a “fact”-oriented physical and mental outer world. The resulting loss of self-control led to an articulation of a rigid pragmatism that in many aspects reminded of an argumentation line known as postecologism (Zeyer, 2008). In the post-ecological discourse of our students, science and technology had played a decisive role (see below). We were interested, then, in the question of whether signs of this discursive constellation could already be observed in younger children of the same cultural background.

Post-ecologism The term ‘post-ecologism’ was coined by Blühdorn (2005) to capture the coincidence of “the comprehensive success of the environmental movement and its comprehensive failure” (Nikel & Reid, 2006, p. 133). The basic point made was that Europe has entered an era in which “the historically radical and transformative elements of environmental movements and eco-political thought are blunted through mainstreaming and have been reconfigured by comprehensive cultural change” (Blühdorn & Welsh, 2006, p.185). In economics and politics, environmental concerns have taken a position of unprecedented prominence. An abundance of eco-political measures are currently being considered and are in the process of being implemented. However, and this is the core point of the post-ecologist diagnose, “the key principles governing Western practices of production, circulation, exchange and consumption remain immutable” (Blühdorn & Welsh, 2006, p.186). Consumer capitalism, infinite economic growth and wealth accumulation, always attacked as intrinsically unsustainable by ecologists, remain untouched and fully in charge. Nikel and Reid (2006) discussed conceptual parallels in environmental education. They found Blühdorn’s terminology to be particularly suitable for the discussion of situatedness and contextualisation of environmental and sustainability education, and they provided a list of cultural aspects characterizing post-ecologism (see Table 1).

Table 1. Characteristics of post-ecologism, adapted from Nikel and Reid (2006) General and full acceptance of the principle relevance of environmental issues combined with the warning that despite all undeniable seriousness, the environmental crisis must not be overstated. Replacement of the emancipatory subject-oriented notion of modernisation by an efficiency-oriented system-

centred understanding where innovation and change have been adopted as intrinsic values. Prominence of neo-materialist and consumption-oriented patterns of identity formation. Disillusionment about the participatory revolution and increasing reliance on supposedly more efficient market mechanisms with concomitant calls for political leadership. Relegation of environmental issues on the political priority list to a position behind employment, security, economic growth, crime and immigration. Institutionalisation of environmental concerns and delegation to ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’. Reformulation of ecological problems as scientific, technological, economic, or managerial issues. End of the vision of a radically different ecological society. Rejection of ecological idealism and dogmatic instance towards so-called political realism/pragmatism that asserts that we have no choice but to adapt to the supposedly non-negotiable imperatives of economic growth, technological progress and global competition. Criminalisation of radical ecologists and direct eco-political action as a variant of terrorism.

We found that, within the post-ecological discursive strategy of our students, science and technology played an important role. A belief in “absolute truths” provided by science combined with a “down to earth” causal logical way of argumentation was the basis for a type of commonsense discourse that echoed much of scientism, the myth “that scientific knowledge deserves unquestioned epistemic privilege” (Cobern & Loving, 2007, p. 427). It was on this presumably solid ground that our students’ talk was characterized by a rigid pragmatism that labelled all ecological argumentation as “idealistic” and greeted “value”-oriented beliefs and intentions with irony, sometimes even with scorn and aggression. In this post-ecological discourse, we found no resonance for “the environment” as an ideal, romantic, technique-free nature, endangered by human presence and activity, especially by science and technique. This discourse also did not provide room for a “contra-factual” belief in saving the environment together with other people. Any hope for behavioural changes in favour of environmental protection was immediately ruled out by “facts” about “the others.” “The others,” so went the argumentation, wouldn’t join in when it came to changing the way of living. Therefore it made no sense to sacrifice personal goods for the sake of environmental protection.

The ROSE study Results reminiscent of post-ecologism can also be found in other research studies, although they are not made explicit as such. The Relevance of Science Education (ROSE) project, for example, was an international survey based at the University of Oslo (Camilla Schreiner & Sjøberg, 2004). Jenkins and Pell (2006) focused their attention on students’ responses to the section of the questionnaire headed “Me and environmental challenges.” Data drawn from 1277 English students, most of them 14 or 15 years old, were used to investigate their attitude towards environmental challenges. Jenkins and Pell concluded that these students found environmental problems important, but were not willing to “sacrifice many personal goods” in order to solve or alleviate environmental problems. A minority of them agreed that they could personally influence what happens to the environment. A substantial majority found however that “each of us can make a significant contribution to environmental protection.” These students showed

considerable confidence that solutions can still be found for environmental problems and that, although environmental problems may make the future look bleak, the situation nevertheless was not irremediable. Girls disagreed more than boys that environmental problems were exaggerated and that people worried too much about environmental problems, and showed a lower level of confidence that science and technology could solve environmental problems. There was a rather high level of support, especially among girls, for the notion that the natural world was something sacred that should be left in peace. The pattern of these results can essentially be seen also in a body of other studies, in a variety of cultural contexts (Chu et al., 2007; Musser & Diamond, 1999; C. Schreiner & Sjørberg, 2004; Yilmaz, Boone, & Andersen, 2004).

Methodology Discourse analyse with younger children Research in environmental education often investigates students’ “beliefs” and “attitudes” towards environmental issues, and takes for granted that these are individual or personal characteristics. A different concept is proposed by discourse analysis, which orients to how talk, conversation, and other communicative processes are used to make meaning (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). From this perspective, what students say and how they communicate it is analyzed as a result of the possibilities that language offers to its speakers rather than as a reflection of their subjectivities (Roth, Lee, & Hwang, 2008). Discourse is then considered to be an expressive machine that becomes “the primary object of research rather than [being seen] as a transparent representation of an individual’s attitudes and beliefs or the true nature of events” (McKenzie 2003, p. 4). This theoretical standpoint entails a research strategy that differs from other frequently used interviewing approaches. Since the research target is not the “thinking in the students’ heads” but the architecture of their talk, there is no use in asking explicit questions on the topic. Rather, the researcher seeks to elicit a fluent discourse on the topic wherein interpretive repertoires can unfold in the communicative space between the participants. Non-standardized interviews are a suitable form of interview to meet this aim (Roth, 2005). At the starting time of our research project, we had decided to adopt this standpoint and intended to investigate interpretive repertoires of these younger students and to compare them with our previous findings. However, in some first field studies we encountered some unexpected problems that we had not encountered in our work with older students. These 11 to 13 yearold kids proved to be rather shy and reluctant when being interviewed. While some of them indeed talked as self-confidently and freely as their older colleagues, most of them tended to give very short answers, sometimes not more than “yes” or “no.” Although we tried to experiment with different settings, with single interviews and focus groups interviews, the results never produced the rich context we needed for our original approach. Especially when it came to complex concepts such as the relation between science/technology and environment, we realized that a solely verbal approach would provide only poor results. It was at this point that we decided to use students’ drawings in our research.

Using drawing to assess children’s environmental perceptions The research into how children depict personally important or emotionally significant topics has had a long tradition (Barraza, 1999). “Children’s drawings can [...] provide valuable information on the development of children’s environmental perceptions“ (p. 64). Drawings can reveal qualities of understanding that can be hidden through other research procedures (White & Gunstone, 2000), provide insights into children’s cognitive, affective and social development (Bowker, 2007) and enable us by a phenomenological approach to view the maker’s way of looking at the world (Malchiodi, 1998). Although children’s drawings have been used by many authors in order to collect empirical data, an established theoretical framework for this type of research has not yet been developed (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2004). This is especially the case when it comes to the identification of “general principles governing children’s depictions of significant environmental problems, further research should be carried out,” as Barraza (1999) points out. Barraza (1999) analysed drawings by 7 to 9 year-old English and Mexican school children. Unlike what had been done so far in most of the research on children’s environmental pictures, she did not explicitly expect the children to draw pictures on environmental problems. Instead she suggested that they should imagine approaching planet Earth in a spaceship, landing there and describing what they see, and later, draw how planet Earth would look fifty years later. These children showed a deep environmental concern in their pictures, and nearly 37% of them depicted some kind of environmental problem. Some feared an uncertain future, others had a pessimistic view, and very few showed an optimistic outlook for the near future. There were more similarities than differences among the English and the Mexican drawings. When it came to environmental problems, the children painted pollution, nuclear waste, deforestation, and climate change, issues that are closely related to the issues of science and technology. Barazza, however, did not especially focus on the role of science and technology in the pictures, which is the focus of our research.

Methods Participants and context We analysed the role of science and technology in the environmental pictures of 408 students aged 11 – 13 years old (mean age 11.83). There were 198 girls (48.8%) and 208 boys (51.2%). In order to also collect verbal statements and information on the general environmental attitude of these children, we decided to use environmental questions asked in the ROSE study. We worked with a foundation in Central Switzerland interested in promoting outdoor learning of children concerning environment and environmental protection. We did research with 20 school classes, each with 20 to 25 students who went on an outdoor excursion featuring glaciers, climate change and hydro power sponsored by the foundation. The teachers of the classes had to apply for the program. Central Switzerland is a region funded mostly by tourism and farming, and all the classes in the project came from small towns or rural schools.

Pre-test There was a pre-test in four classes that did not take part in the project. In this pre-test we had two aims. First, we wanted to test the procedure itself, that is, the distribution of the questionnaires, the instructions of the teachers, and the response of the students. Second, we tested the questionnaire, especially the translation of the ROSE questions into German. We visited the four classes, and provided the questionnaires together with the instructions for the teacher and let them proceed as if we were not there. At the end of the intervention, the teachers and the students were interviewed. We found that the teachers were very positive about the test, especially about the use of drawing. They felt confident that a teacher could do the intervention by him/herself and that s/he did not need any assistance from us. We therefore decided to post the questionnaires to the teachers in the study and not to assist the intervention personally. Also, we found that the children liked to draw the pictures. They worked independently and felt stimulated by the open nature of the task. The teachers did indicate that it was important to point out to the children that their comments had to be understandable to the researchers. Concerning the questions, we had to slightly adapt some of them in order to better match the linguistic capacity of the children. For example, in question 2 (“Environmental problems make the future of the world look bleak”), we had translated the word “bleak” into the German word “duster.” The children did not understand this word so we had to change it into “schlechter” (“worse”). Another example is statement No 6 (“I can personally influence what happens with the environment”). Here the children did not understand the word “influence” (“beeinflussen”). We therefore used the statement, “I can personally do something for the environment.”

Research design After the pre-test, our research design was as follows. Three weeks before the students’ outdoor trip, we sent the questionnaires and teacher’s manual to the classes. The teachers were informed by a letter that we were interested in their students’ pre-concepts and that this information could improve the outdoor program. Since the trip was free for teachers and students, they apparently regarded completing the questionnaires as a service in return as we enjoyed a 100% response rate. Teachers distributed the questionnaires and informed the students of our aims. The students read the questionnaire, which asked them first to drawing the picture and then to answer the questions. Each child was asked to draw a picture of her/his associations with the “environment.” (Since “Umwelt,” (“environment”) always has an ecological connotation in Swiss German, this task was unambiguous to the students). Additionally we asked them to write a few words to describe the meaning of their picture. There could be several arguments against our use of children’s drawings. First, it could be argued that the instructions were vague and the students were not told why they were doing the drawing. However, this argumentation would only be convincing if we had promoted the traditional approach of

identifying individual “thoughts” and “attitudes” of students. We believed that if we had introduced a rationale like “we are trying to understand how you think science influences the environment,” then we would have spoiled the opportunity to see science and technology spontaneously emerge (or not) in a rich context of narrative drawings. Indeed, we wanted to avoid focusing the children’s attention on certain aspects that reflected our own expectations and interests. Second, one could critique our inability to single out important factors that also might influence what the students drew. For example, could not the activities that the kids had done immediately prior to the drawing influence their drawings? Our answer is clearly that of course various factors will influence the drawings of these children, but this is taken for granted in a discursive approach that is interested in classroom communication and does not pretend to look into the children’s brains. Finally, we could be asked about the confound of the teachers’ attitudes towards the environment and environmental protection. These teachers were the main teachers of the classes. They were not specialised in one subject, but general teachers as is normal for these grade levels. The teachers had enrolled the class in the outdoor excursion. It was indeed likely that the teachers’ attitudes and opinions influenced the children’s ideas, but it is impossible to control this and, in fact, it is not desirable to do so given our methodological approach. Like us, Barraza (1999) chose, explicitly to avoid a bias towards environmental problems, a narrative approach by using a story of a spaceship approaching Earth as a starting point for drawings. There was no discussion before the activity except to introduce it. Similarly, Bawker (2007), who analysed children’s pictures to investigate their knowledge about tropical rainforests, let the children make their drawings simply on the “tropical rainforest” and encouraged them to express their knowledge in as relaxed an atmosphere as possible to stimulate their creative imagination. For these reasons, we chose to let the children first do their drawings before answering the 15 environmental ROSE questions (see Appendix 1). The teachers were explicitly instructed to respect this order of tasks, and to answer only questions of understanding and to avoid suggestions as to the possible or expected answers.

Data analysis The use of pictures instead of interviews created two challenges. The first was that pictures do not yield discourse in a technical sense. Barraza (1999) used content analysis to determine thematic categories, such as “things improve” or “things get worse” (p. 54). Categories of this type seemed to be too formalistic to work for us as “interpretive repertoires.” Bowker (2007) also determined themes from interviews and drawings, but his themes, such as “trees and plants” or “rainforest features,” were focused on mainly factual aspects of the drawings to work for us. Instead, we started from a similar place as Reynolds and Wetherell (2003) who wrote: “Interpretive repertoires are the recognizable routines of arguments, descriptions and evaluations found in people’s talk often distinguished by familiar clichés, anecdotes, and tropes. They are the building blocks through which people develop accounts and versions of significant events and through which they perform social life” (p. 496). Their definition seemed to be applicable also

to pictures, and we understood categories more in the sense of “image repertoires” (W.-M. Roth, personal communication, Sept 30, 2009). The second challenge of our analysis was that we wanted the results to be comparable to our previous findings. Purely open coding, as understood grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), would not fulfill the requirement of categories that fit into our theoretical framework of post-ecologism and that allowed comparisons to the findings of the ROSE study. Berg’s (2005) variant of qualitative content analysis became useful. This methodological concept is essentially a combination of both a top-down (analytical) and a bottom-up (grounded) approach. The top-down element guarantees a good fit with the theoretical framework and it is comparable to the “grid of analysis” in discourse analysis (Flick, von Kardorff, Keupp, von Rosenstiel, & Wolff, 1995). The bottom-up element allows for an empirical saturation process as described in grounded theory. The two elements are combined in an iterative process that works to find a reflective equilibrium. Adopting this procedure to determine categories allowed us to ensure the desired complexity of “image repertoires.” Our primary analytical categories were derived from our previous findings on the post-ecological discourse of older students. We thus distinguished a fact-oriented, pragmatic attitude towards the environment and environmental protection (labelled as post-ecological) from a value-oriented, idealistic stance (labelled as ecological). The relation between the two stances is, from a theoretical point of view, not oppositional but sequential. A post-ecological attitude is not “anti-ecological” but has emerged from the ecological stance in a precisely defined way, and is thus dialectical and not complementary. Working from the findings of Jenkins and Pell (2006), we inferred a second dialectic tension between an ecocentric and anthropocentric stance: “An anthropocentric stance is essentially utilitarian and rests on the view that environment-related decisions should seek to generate the greatest good for the largest number of people. An ecocentric view assigns intrinsic value to all aspect of the environment, animate and inanimate” (p. 773). By open and axial coding we derived grounded categories. In the open coding process, we proceeded by choosing salient aspects of the pictures by grouping them into themes and finally condensing these groups into empirical categories. In the axial coding process, we tested these categories again in the drawings, adapted them to the various contexts and, when necessary, unified them into overarching categories. During this process, the system of categories was adapted through an iteration of working cycles until saturation. Finally, the process ended with a synthesis of the analytical and grounded categories. Our resulting categories differ from purely formal categories as they are often used in content analysis. As explained above they are “building blocks” of the “discourse” established in the pictures. Each picture was coded using this categorical system. Two independent coders attributed a maximum of three codes to each picture. Unclear codes were discussed in several coding sessions. At the end of this process, 34 codes remained unclear. In a last coding session, a third coder (the first author) joined in to help resolve these and the categorical system was established. It is important to realize that in this paradigm of qualitative coding, interpreter reliability is not the top issue of the process. The coding process is seen as iterative with the intent of producing consensual validation by a systematic

argumentation process (Bortz & Döring, 2003, p. 335f). There is no intention to find “objective” codings of the pictures, but rather to understand the communicative setting in the pictures.

Results Each student drew a picture and answered the questionnaire. To present the results, we start by describing the final system of categories. We then present the frequencies of each category and finally provide the descriptive statistics of the survey.

Categories A hierarchically ordered overview of the categorical system can be seen in Figure 1. It starts with the two main categories “post-ecological (pragmatist, fact-oriented)” and “ecological (idealistic, value-oriented).” Each of these two categories splits into two second order categories based on the dialectic ecocentricanthropocentric. These four main categories provide the framework for 13 grounded categories. PE: post-ecological (fact-oriented, pragmatic)

E: ecological (value-oriented, idealistic)

PE/E: p.e.-ecocentric

PE/A: p.e.-anthropocentric

E/E: e.-ecocentric

E/A: e.-anthropocentric

PE/E.1: Sc/T as a solution for environmental problems

PE/A.1: Sc/T damage the environment, but we cannot avoid it

E/E.1: Sc/T damage the environment which is bad

E/A.1: Nature as an arrangement of nice things

PE/E.2: Sc/T help to describe and understand nature

PE/A.2: Sc/T help to exploit nature as a human resource

E/E.2: Environmental protection means avoiding Sc/T

E/A.2: Nature as a source of life quality

PE/A.3: Nature as backdrop for Sc/T

E/E.3: Nature as an ethical/normative Value

PE/A.4: Environmental protection is bad for economical prosperity

E/E.4: Nature as aesthetic value

E/E.5: Bambization of nature

Figure 1. Hierarchical presentation of the categorical system for the content analysis

The codes of each picture were counted and analyzed by descriptive statistics. Table 2 shows the counts of each category. The first column gives the total counts, the following columns list the counts for female and male students respectively.

Category

Total

female

male

PE/E.1: Science/Technology as a solution for environmental problems

55

30

25

PE/E.2: Science/Technology helps to describe and understand nature

20

3

17

PE/A.1: Science/Technology damages the environment, but we cannot avoid it

25

10

15

PE/A.2: Science/Technology helps to exploit nature as a human resource

24

9

15

PE/A.3: Nature as backdrop for Science/Technology

30

18

12

PE/A.4: Environmental protection is bad for economic prosperity

2

1

1

E/E.1: Science/Technology damages the environment which is bad

205

90

115

E/E.2: Environmental protection means avoiding Science/Technology

39

23

16

E/E.3: Nature as an ethical/normative value

40

22

18

E/E.4: Nature as aesthetic value

45

28

17

E/E.5: “Bambization” of nature

53

39

14

E/A.1: Nature as an arrangement of nice things

28

14

14

E/A.2: Nature as a source of life quality

16

9

7

Table 2. Counts per category

By far the most frequently codified category was “Science/Technology damages the environment which is bad.” In this category, 208 pictures depicted science and technology posing threats to an intact natural environment and condemned this impact either by the content of the picture or by corresponding comments. The second most frequent category was “Science/Technology as a solution for environmental problems,” followed by the other four subcategories of the main category Ecological-Ecocentric: “Bambization of nature,” “Nature as an aesthetic value,” “Nature as an ethical/normative value” and “Environmental protection means avoiding Science/Technology.” The most rarely counted categories were “Environmental protection is bad for economical prosperity,” “Nature as a source of life quality” and “Science/Technology helps to describe and understand nature.” The situation is essentially the same for both genders. By doing cross tabulations, we found only two significant differences concerning boys and girls: “Science/Technology helps to describe and understand nature” (boys 17, girls 3, Pearson Chi-Square=9.601, df=1, p