Dialogue based strategies in the teaching of environmental education in Baja California Sur, Mexico

The Mexican Ministry of Education (SEP) recognizes that teachers in general possess no training in environmental education or in strategies that facilitate participation amongst students. However, following the Mexican government approval of the Law of Environmental Education, in 2005, the inclusion of environment education in the elementary school curricula of Baja California Sur, Mexico, has become a priority. This study approaches this shortfall to consider the use of dialogic teaching as a strategy for increasing environmental awareness, whether if it can support children’s own sense of agency and whether it can successfully be incorporated into the permanent curriculum of Baja California Sur classrooms. The study takes a sociocultural approach drawing on the works of Vygotsky (1962, 1981), Barnes (1976, 2008) and more recently, Alexander (2008) and Mercer (2004, 2008). In particular, the study adapts the work of Mercer’s Thinking Together programme (2008) which was used to create a programme of work piloted in 7 schools, and as a theoretical foundation for the analysis of children’s’ recorded oral interchanges and written narratives. The research was conducted using a mixed methods approach to acquire and analyse qualitative and quantitative data. Its main focus is on the narratives produced by the children in the study as markers of improved environmental knowledge and awareness. The study also used reflexive researcher narratives following Clough (2002) and Denzin (2008) in which the researcher enters and acknowledges his own impact in the research environment, and explains this interaction to the reader through a narrative. The results were separated as quantitative and qualitative results. Quantitative data records significant gains in environmental knowledge indicators and in the count of dialogic and environmental keywords. Qualitative analysis records improvements in several aspects of the dialogue dynamics within the classroom, and in all the measured indicators.