**12. Initial teacher reactions to Green Pedagogy**

Green Pedagogy was new for all the non-Austrian participants in the ProfESus course. Even the participants from Germany, although German-speaking, had not been introduced to this approach before. For the Austrian participants, some of whom were recruited through the project coordinating organization, UCAEP, which also developed the pedagogy, Green Pedagogy was nothing new and already embedded in their practice.

In the blended ProfESus course, questions arose because of the unfamiliarity of the new pedagogical framework. Below are the four main questions together with responses.


The question also refers to the use of Green Pedagogy throughout a course, which is implied in the methodology aims of Green Pedagogy and therefore it is beneficial to integrate sustainable work practices in most lessons.


## **13. Identifying a sustainable mindset**

We could attempt to see how well the concept of Green Pedagogy was embedded in our teacher participants by examining the learner diaries that we asked them

*Teacher Education in the 21st Century - Emerging Skills for a Changing World*

understanding of it.

and after the course.

**11.1 Irritation**

**11.2 Provocation**

brought in by the teacher.

**11.3 The value of the last two stages**

**11. Areas of potential misunderstanding**

issues regarding Green Pedagogy became apparent.

ing or out of place is presented to them.

it in their project lesson(s) in Module 3 by using the specially developed learning activity plan template in which the elements of Green Pedagogy were embedded. At the meta-level, the project partners planned the blended learning course itself to follow the Green Pedagogy structure. In the next section, we will review some of the questions and misunderstandings that our participants experienced as they tried to understand the translated version of Green Pedagogy in English. Note that for almost all the participants, English was their second language, which could have created an even greater remove between the original German version and their final

The project had several opportunities to discover participant reactions to the new approach. These included the two face-to-face weeks, the learning diaries that formed a required part of the course, dialog during three online meetings that occurred during the online section of the course, the content of the responses that the participants gave to the required tasks and multiple feedback surveys during

From the experience of the ProfESus pilot blended learning course the following

The word as it is used in German can best be compared to the grit that forms the pearl in the oyster, meaning that this is a stage that can be used to generate new understanding and learning. It is unfortunate that the German word has its direct English equivalent, which is rather negative in meaning. Some of the ProfESus course participants therefore understood this stage 3 at first to mean that they should cause annoyance in their students, rather than the intended meaning that an attempt should be made to make learners stop and think when something surpris-

The challenge with this in stage 3 is that it seems too similar to the first confrontation phase, but also with placing it sometime into the lesson rather than at the beginning. Many teachers understand the value of starting a lesson by provocation, so waiting for this stage had to be justified. However, the second name for this stage, intervention, might make things clearer. Thus, a lesson starts with a confrontation that identifies and defines a problem and after exploration of that problem has begun, targeted interventions that widen the perspective of the problem, are

The issue of sustainable development as a central topic for a lesson is becoming more popular as the urgency of the problem becomes more apparent. Repositories such as the World's Largest Lesson and the British Council, which helps teachers globally teaching English, offer a wealth of free resources. It is common in these lesson plans to stop at the point when the sustainability problem has been described and analyzed. The last two stages of the Green Pedagogy approach are extremely important to combat feelings of hopelessness and lack of agency by focusing on

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to compile as part of the four-month course. A text analysis carried out using a content analysis software tool showed that the concept of Green Pedagogy was a minor rather than a major theme for the ProfESus participants [27]. This indicated that there was more work to be done in conveying the practice of Green Pedagogy more efficiently in English and that a four-month course is insufficient on its own to effect sustainable change in didactics and education. A continuous peer-reflection process might help to implement Green Pedagogy enduringly into a wider field of learning.
