Population growth (PG) is one of the drivers of the environmental crisis and underlies almost every environmental problem. Despite its causative role in environmental challenges, it has gained little attention from popular media, public and government agenda, or even from environmental organizations. There is a gap between the gravity of the problem and its relative absence from the public discourse that stems, inter alia, from the fact that the very discussion of the subject raises many sensitive, complex and ethical questions. The education system is a key player in filling this gap, and teachers have an opportunity to facilitate the discussion in this important issue. While educators mostly agree to include controversial environmental topics in school curricula, calls for addressing PG remain rare. This study explores teachers’ perspectives of PG as a problem and their attitudes towards including it in their teaching, focusing on environmental and non-environmental teachers. While perceiving PG as an environmental problem and supporting its inclusion in schools was significantly higher among the environmental-teachers, similar concerns were reported by all the teachers concerning engaging students in discourse around this controversial issue. This consensus indicates the limited impact of knowledgeability on teachers’ intentions to address PG in class. Teachers’ challenges reflect the dominant Israeli sociocultural norms, religious values and the national pronatalist ideologies. The findings demonstrate how the absence of PG from the public discourse and from school curricula influences teachers’ motivation to address it in class. This study highlights the necessity to encourage teachers to address PG in their teaching, even in this reality, by providing them with appropriate tools that will enable them to successfully engage students in this controversial issue.
Purpose Distributed leadership has been reported in the literature as an effective management approach for educational organizations such as institutions of higher education. This study aims to investigate the role of distributed leadership in the promotion of sustainability in an Israeli college of teacher education. Design/methodology/approach Based on the Multi-Level Model of Leadership Practice in higher education, taken from Bolden et al. (2008a) and from Woods et al. (2004), the authors investigated how the characteristics of distributed leadership are expressed in three central organization-wide structures in the college (a student group, the green council and a professional development program). They also explored in what ways aspects of distributed leadership promote sustainability-oriented activities on campus. They used a deductive and inductive interpretive approach in this case study. Findings The authors found three organization-level processes that are based on the principles of distributed leadership and that promote sustainability on campus: distributed leadership enables change in the organization’s internal culture with respect to mainstreaming sustainability; distributed leadership encourages collaboration between the entire campus population and between different departments and distributed leadership on campus enables the development of diverse “bottom-up” and “top-down” structures in the organization. Originality/value While the study’s findings indicated several challenges regarding the implementation of distributed leadership in the organization, they ultimately support the idea that distributed leadership may contribute to the long-term, organization-wide implementation of sustainability in higher education institutes. Therefore, the authors recommend that institutions that are willing to promote sustainability adopt distributed leadership as their major management approach.
A multicultural socio-environmental project that is framed in the ideas of education for sustainability brought together Jew and Arab students was investigated to identify the participants' views of the program's objectives and their accomplishments. We investigated the project's strengths and weaknesses according to the participants' views and the way culturally diverse students addressed the main local socio-environmental conflict related to conservation versus development of a local creek. The participants agreed that the environmental objectives were properly attained, while the social objectives were accomplished to a limited extent. All the participants emphasized the importance of multicultural knowledge and expected to learn and work together. We found different views of the Jewish and the Arab participants regarding expectations, collaboration and overall satisfaction, with higher expectations of the Arab students and leaders. The students' views of the local conflict varied but were not associated with their ethnic background. We suggest that the differences between the groups result from the different positions and needs of each community, and mainly as a consequence of the difficulties that the Arab minority faces in Israel. Overall, we found that the project allowed the expression of multiple voices of both groups, and suggested an applicable program for education for sustainability in a multicultural society.
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