Preparing Future Teachers of Polish for the Challenges of Environmental Education

Abstract

The issues addressed in this article represent a trend in interdisciplinary research concerned with educating and training future teachers of the Polish language to prepare them for the challenges of the modern world. These challenges include climate change and its consequences for humanity and the planet. The success of environmental education depends to a large extent on how well teachers are prepared for its effective implementation. The Polish language as a school subject plays a key role in the education of the young, because it teaches students how to think, express their feelings and opinions, and participate in dialogue and discussion. Analysis of the core curriculum for general education shows that it does not contain satisfactory provisions and fails to meet the expectations of modern environmental education. Moreover, the standard of teacher education, both in its general and specific parts, needs to be extended and supplemented with necessary provisions. The catalogue of learning outcomes should be extended to include
the following issues: environmental education and the ways of its implementation, design and implementation of programs concerned with ecology, creating didactic situations aimed at popularizing pro-ecological knowledge and attitudes, developing ecocritical methods of interpreting traditional and well-known texts or indicating new contexts for those texts. It is also necessary to reform pedagogical practices to enable students to observe and join pro-ecological activities of teachers of Polish and schools during their implementation. The article draws attention to the need to develop communication skills necessary in talking about climate change. Substantive education should be enriched with issues related to ecocriticism and to interpretative practices of literary creativity in terms of its pro-ecological and post-anthropocentric possibilities.