Introduction: Systems thinking as a base for sustainable development

Sustainable development is a wide and complex item often connected to environment and environmental policy. There are studies that show the importance of species identification, interest in nature and outdoor experience for achieving the understanding of environmental issues and understanding of a sustainable lifestyle.

The fact is that there is an environmental knowledge gap existing. Ecological literacy is important to bridge this gap. It is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of complex casual relationships, as relationships between human systems and natural systems might be. The starting point to develop this complex understanding is for students to develop a mature understanding of key ecological concepts. These key concepts support more complex concepts which are the base for understanding the more complex relationships.

In today’s society humans need to develop a narrow specialization, but they also need to develop a capacity of holistic thinking. This capacity of holistic thinking or systemic thinking is needed because for example sustainable development that links economy, human life and natural environment into one single entity. There are also some recent ecological literacy frameworks that emphasize systems thinking for the construction of a “big picture” view. Systems thinking is a way of thinking that can get people to see their part in the big picture. All are part of a system, everything you do affects the system. If a component is changing in a system, it causes changes in the other system components. The focus in such thinking is on processes and entirety instead of parts.

Objectives: This will be a presentation of an article in progress. Newly qualified teachers teach about nature and biodiversity with the skills they have obtained during the obligatory part of their teacher education. Knowledge and identification of species is one of the factors that are important in developing an interest in environmental issues and sustainable development. The aim of the study is to find out more about Nordic student teachers’ conceptions about the relationship between species identification, biodiversity and sustainable development and to try to find out if the student teachers develop some kind of systems thinking through their teacher studies.

Methods: The survey was conducted as a questionnaire to 456 second- to fourth- year student teachers. For this article mainly one qualitative question in the survey was analyzed. To analyze the relationships between the concepts we have used content analysis of the images and content analysis of text and terms as a method.

Results: The results from the study are not completed yet.

Conclusion: Because the results from the study are not completed yet, there are no conclusions yet.