Conference Agenda

Plant blindness (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999) and plant awareness disparity (Parsley, 2020) refer to a discrepancy in awareness, attitude, knowledge and understanding of the environmental and social importance of plants. More recently Pany et al. (2022) used plant awareness to promote a solution-oriented perspective to the visual perception, categorisation, knowledge about and attitudes toward plants. This field of scholarship has been of research interest for over two decades and remains so in a time when knowledge and skills for sustainable development and global citizenship are priorities for education systems internationally (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2024; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2024). Notably, all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are linked to plant health and use (Amprazis & Papadopoulou, 2026). When almost half are moving too slowly and 18% are in reverse (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2025), education for plant awareness has never been more important.

Educators play a significant role to build plant awareness through multi-disciplinary approaches in a range of educational environments, including those promoting education for sustainable development (Amprazis & Papadopoulou, 2020, 2025a, 2025b; Thomas et al., 2022). However, a large body of literature signals that, internationally, pre- and in-service teachers require support for developing plant awareness (Bobo-Pinilla et al., 2023; Stagg & Dillon, 2022,Brkovic, 2025 #1337; Torres-Porras & Alcántara-Manzanares, 2021). Despite continued interest in teacher education from early childhood to secondary and in a range of subjects (e.g., Borsos et al., 2023; Fiel’ardh et al., 2023; Nyberg et al., 2019; Torres-Porras & Alcántara-Manzanares, 2021), literature seems to focus on the teachers themselves, perhaps overlooking critical individuals in the teacher education space, teacher educators.

In addition, there are methodological considerations that could contribute to a better understanding of how to grow educators’ capacity for strengthening the public’s plant awareness. A current methodological complication arises from an over-reliance on a small number of quantitative methods signalling contributions from mixed methods and qualitative approaches as appropriate for exploratory plant awareness research (Sanders et al., 2025). Moreover approaches informed by education research can enable affective and cognitive aspects of plant awareness to be captured (Stagg & Dillon, 2022) responding to a need to develop measures of self-reported attitudes, values, behaviours and intentions that more directly operationalise different aspects of plant awareness (Brkovic et al., 2025). Addressing these methodological concerns can complement quantitative studies (e.g., Pany et al., 2022) and make important contributions to understanding the interconnections between plant awareness domains.

This workshop introduces a study applying constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014) to teacher education by exploring: To what extent can professional learning experiences build tertiary, pre- and in-service educators’ plant awareness and capacity to plan for meaningful learning experiences? The study aims to respond to calls for investigating instructional approaches which target not only pre- and in-service teachers (Stagg et al., 2025), but also teacher educators, in ways that promote a comprehensive plant education across sectors and through long term evaluation (Amprazis & Papadopoulou, 2026). The workshop also aims to contribute to methodological discussions by showcasing, trialling and reflecting on two qualitative data collection tools designed to capture knowledge and affective components surrounding plant awareness. Personal meaning making maps (PMMMs) and collaborative interactive discussions (CIDs) (Giardiello et al., 2014) are introduced to demonstrate ways to track changes in educators’ perceptions of their developing practice. Participants will experience an abridged professional learning session while utilising these data collection tools and reflecting on emerging data from the study. The workshop concludes with a discussion about how these data collection tools could be used and applied to participants’ research interests.