Bridging environmental education trans-Atlantic: An American and Hungarian teacher in-service project

This paper reviews a two-year teacher training effort that brought together twenty teachers from Hungary and the United States to develop and implement an environmental education curriculum into US and Hungarian middle and high schools. From the data collected, several characteristics emerged regarding Hungarian and US teachers. Initially, the two groups of teachers differed in their definitions of environmental education, their understanding of inquiry, their interest and willingness to use issue analysis in their teaching, and their understanding and incorporation of non-governmental organizations and community service projects into the classroom. At the end of the project, teacher definitions of environmental education generally represented a broader understanding more characteristic of the Hungarian teachers' initial definitions. Both groups of teachers' abilities to define inquiry were similar; however, implementing inquiry remained unclear for the Hungarian teachers. Both groups were supportive of the use of non-governmental organizations in their classroom, although the Hungarian teachers continued to be reluctant to incorporate issue analysis in their classroom.