Educational Action Research to Generate Ecological Wisdom of Insight for Inclusion and Sustainability

This study relates the experience of educational action research with pre-service teachers aimed at exploring their views on ecological identity, which is considered the basis for a person's life activity, and its orientation towards inclusion in or exclusion from the global community of life. Through gradual opening of communicative space and participation in critical discourse, research participants became involved in the cycles of reflection on their experiences of interaction with the social and natural world to reveal the features of individual and collective ecological identity that they consider most characteristic for themselves and their community. The present study describes how, through exploration of ecological identity which was found to have four dimensions (cognitive, affective, axiological and conative) as well as a clearly perceived orientation towards apprehended belonging to the community of life and its support system, the participants of educational action research engaged in the process of generating ecological wisdom of insight for sustainability (person's inclusion in the living world based on inclusive interrelations with the global community of life and its support system). We argue that it is a wisdom that pre-service teachers need so as to be able to help their pupils become responsible members of the community of life and actors of change for a sustainable future.