Environmental education

About: Environmental education is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 14551 publications have been published within this topic receiving 211056 citations. The topic is also known as: environmental learning.

Environmental Education: Arguing the case for multiple approaches

Abstract: This paper develops existing arguments about the need to rethink ways in which environmental education is conceptualised, interpreted and enacted by schools, teachers and students working within their communities. In doing this, it critiques what it sees as the narrowing and constraining influence that socially critical theory has exerted over the field, and calls for multiple approaches, carefully and communally deliberated on, in order to deliver the (environmental) educational goals deemed appropriate and necessary by schools and communities. Such an approach, it is argued, will likely be cross-disciplinary and multi-faceted in that it will be informed by a combination of traditions and ideological persuasions which together will offer more than any one of them could alone.

The History and Philosophy of Environmental Education

Abstract: Environmental education (EE) is a powerful educational tool with a complex and somewhat tumultuous history Since its rise to relative prominence in the 1970s, it has often been misunderstood with regard to its exact definition, its origins, its objectives, its goals, and often its value to society and K-12 education The primary contributing factors to this dilemma may be the broad set of disciplines from which EE sprang, from which it continues to draw, and its relationship to other disciplines and fields of study The situation is further exacerbated by the lack of uniform terminology applied to EE and many related areas of study and practice This chapter traces the historical and philosophical development of the field, relates environmental education as presently practiced to the mosaic of K-12 education with a focus on its relationship to science education, and lays the groundwork for further discussion of EE’s place in the education of teachers of science for the twenty-first century

Towards a Political Ecology of Education: The Educational Politics of Scale in Southern Pará, Brazil.

Abstract: Social movements have initiated both academic programs and disciplines. I present ethnographic data that I gathered during 17 months of fieldwork with the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in southeastern Para, Brazil, to explore the MST’s role in creating agroecological education opportunities. My analysis highlights three factors in southeastern Para that initiate environmental education opportunities. First, activist professors are key players, serving as mediators between the state and social movements. Second, recurring events incubate environmental educational institutions and degree programs. Third, by collaborating with institutionalized education, movements are able to develop their own radical educational spaces. These three factors result in a gradual anti-neoliberal transformation in southeastern Para’s rural educational opportunities. I develop a theoretical perspective of the political ecology of education to understand the relations between these three factors and educational chang...