Ideology and Ontological Security

Abstract

The implementation of the Sustainable Schools Program was accompanied by the development of educational rhetoric–reality gaps, influenced most significantly by the teachers’ perceptions and experiences of the practicalities of implementing a socially-critical pedagogy. The major differences between the teachers whose classroom practices defined best practice and those whose practices represented a rhetoric–reality gap were best described as aspects of teacher agency. This chapter identifies important relationships between the beliefs held by the teachers, the values embedded within the goals of the Sustainable Schools Program and the practice of a socially-critical pedagogy, and the pedagogical practices that the teachers chose to employ when asked to implement the program. This discussion draws on Giddens’ theory of structuration to highlight the critical elements of such relationships, particularly in terms of the teachers’ environmental and educational ideologies and the notion of ontological security, and the role of these elements in the development of the educational rhetoric–reality gaps that accompanied the implementation of the Sustainable Schools Program—here identified as ‘ideological rhetoric–reality gaps’. Understanding the manner in which ‘ideological rhetoric–reality gaps’ contribute to the duality of structure and agency in a teacher’s classroom practice assists to identify potential intervention points for reducing the prevalence and/or severity of such educational rhetoric–reality gaps in the future.