Browsing by Author "Tasajärvi, Anu"

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine the views of teachers participating in the Transformers 2030 education on the phenomenon of sustainable development and to find out how they experience their own opportunities to promote sustainability in the context of the school. The aim of the thesis is to study, through discourse analysis, the talk produced by teachers on the promotion of sustainable development. The focus will be on joint and small group discussions, as well as written outputs. This study is timely because studies show that people are easily paralysed by too complex issues. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the radical weakening of the balance of nature are shaking people's sense of security and hope. Imagineing alternative futures and acting on them are ways to strengthen confidence and hope for the future. This thesis is a qualitative study in which research material has been approached from the point of view of social constructivism. Discourse analysis was built around the language produced by individuals. Teachers and educators, participating in Transformers 2030 -training (n=34) throughout Finland in autumn 2021, participated in the study. The training took the form of distance training, which is why the research material consisted of different audio and visual recordings. Discourse analysis was used to study the material produced in the training. The analysis identified factors which could be interpreted to answer the research questions of the study. Understanding the phenomenon of sustainable development and the importance of action in line with its objectives was important for teachers. Although they experienced uncertainty in their competence and know-how, they considered the lack of social debate and concrete actions to be more problematic. The lack of cooperation and a common direction was also seen as an essential challenge in the field of sustainable development education. Teachers had the will to change their own thinking patterns and the need to produce teaching aimed at understanding biodiversity. They thought that the change should be based on the perspective in which nature is at the heart of all acting and making decisions. Teachers used utopia to express alternative future images and felt that this kind of work was liberating and giving hope.