Teachers’ conceptions of nature and environment in 16 countries

By using an original framework involving complementary statistical approaches, we investigated the environmental attitudes of 6,379 pre-service and in-service teachers in 16 countries of Europe and its neighbourhood. To test hypotheses about the nature of environmental attitudes, we examined the variation across groups of individuals (between-class analysis), investigated the independent effects of several candidate explanatory factors (orthogonal analysis), and finally inspected potential relationships between conceptions on a variety of topics (co-inertia analysis). In accordance with the 2-MEV model of Wiseman and Bogner, we identified two independent dimensions that are, respectively, “Preservation” and “Utilization” oriented. Although attitudes mainly differed across countries with respect to the Utilization dimension, as the influence of socio-economic background seemed to be prominent, the 2-dimensional structure was robust in varying contexts, and teacher discipline was a consistent source of variation in attitudes within countries.