School Culture Based on Education for Sustainability & Action Research

Abstract

A common educational vision does not usually exist in the current educational life in the schools, so many teachers use to follow a lonely route which is limited in their class or in their teaching subjects. In this paper we present the findings of our study, in which we set the question if such lonely routes of the teachers in the same school, could lead to the transformation of the school to a "Sustainable School". Through our study we investigated the transformation of the whole school culture trough the implementation of an educational project in the field of Education for Environment and Sustainability. We decided to use "Action Research" as the most appropriate methodological research approach for our study, as we had as main goal to change a difficult situation in our school where the teachers were working lonely, each of them in its own path. The results of our study showed that this educational intervention, through the procedure of participatory planning, reflection and re-planning, led to the awareness of the whole school community and the transformation of the whole school culture. The teachers changed their personal educational theories and their teaching practices regarding the educational approach of Education for Sustainability and also their collaboration framework. Through our overall refection combining with findings of similar studies we were led to the major conclusion that the transformation of the culture in a school is difficult to be succeed due to the fact that continuous and daily participatory work is needed.