Nature Experiences and Education for Sustainability in Physical Education and Teacher Education : Environmental Identities of PE Teachers in Sweden and Switzerland

Sport, as a human activity, contributes to the changes happening in the natural environment, making the sport sector a responsible actor for sustainable development. Experiences in nature can raise awareness about our natural environment and possibly influence pro-environmental behaviour and our identities. Such nature experiences can be reached in schools with teachers as implementers and role models. Swedish schools for example, have a concept called friluftsliv, which introduces children to outdoor experiences as part of Physical Education (PE). In Switzerland, a similar country to Sweden in many aspects, such a concept is non-existent. Thus, this study aims to observe possible differences and similarities between environmental identities of PE teachers in Sweden and Switzerland, how those developed and manifest today. Primary and secondary school PE teachers from Switzerland and Sweden were asked to draw nature and were interviewed individually as well as in separate group discussions. The model of Education for Sustainability, Transformative Learning Theory, and Identity Theory serve as the theoretical framework of this work. The results show that there are many individual differences in how the PE teachers’ environmental identities manifest. Some see nature as a platform for activities, some deeply care for it, some seek interactions with it or even perceive themselves as a part of the natural world. When it comes to Swiss participants, main influences on their environmental identity were identified before Physical Education teacher education (PETE) through sport-related activities with their family, in associations or their leisure time, whereas the Swedish experiences were more sport-unrelated, connected to family experiences and as part of PETE. I conclude, according to the model of Education for Sustainability, that there were less transformative learning effects and therefore less behavioural change achieved in Swiss PETE than in Swedish PETE. The main difference was the amount of reflection about said nature experiences, which was more present in the Swedish context. Incorporating this reflective aspect into PE curricula could be an approach to increase this reflective aspect, in Switzerland as well as in Sweden.