Conceptions of environmental education in Mexican primary education: teachers’ views and curriculum aims

School teachers’ conceptions of environmental education: reinterpreting a typology through a thematic analysis

“…This article draws from a broader interpretative multiple-case study of Year Six (11-12 years old) teachers working in Mexican primary education in the 2014-2015 school year (Benavides-Lahnstein, 2017). The multiple-case type is composed of various individual cases or units of analysis through which a social phenomenon is studied; usually, the phenomenon in question is shared or common amongst the individual cases.…”

“…Besides the influence of the EE culture (or lack of it) in schools and teachers' background, we noticed that other factors, such as professional training opportunities, policies and practices in school, the broader education system, also influenced the EE conceptions of the teachers (Osborn and Broadfoot, 1993). For instance, the current National Curriculum and primary school programmes include EE mostly through environmental sciences content and vaguely promotes an education for the environment approach (Benavides-Lahnstein, 2017;Paredes-Chi and Viga-de Alba, 2017). Accordingly, our participants used some of the subjects' content, especially the Natural Sciences content, to explain EE and without making clear suggestions to education for the environment.…”