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.

Expanding the Foundation: Climate Change and Opportunities for Educational Research

Abstract: Human-caused climate change is a dominant global challenge. Unlike other disciplines and fields, there has as yet been only limited attention to climate change in educational research generally, and in educational foundations in particular. Education is key to assisting humanity in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and educational researchers working within diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions and a broad array of research contexts need to engage in this most pressing of challenges. We argue that the field needs a new commitment to a form of educational justice appropriately scaled to the size of the challenge we face. We address this gap by reviewing current thinking on the human dimensions of climate change and summarizing what research has been conducted in the area of climate change education as a means of identifying a range of possibilities for educational research and praxis.

Teacher Education for Sustainability. II. Two Teacher Education Projects from Asia and the Pacific.

Abstract: Our schools and educators face a compelling responsibility to serve society by fostering the transformations needed to set us on a path to sustainable development in the 21st century. Education for sustainability is a new paradigm for a life long learning process that leads to an informed and involved citizenry having the creative problem solving skills, scientific, technological, and social literacy, and commitment to engage in responsible actions that will help ensure an environmentally sound, socially just, and economically prosperous future for all. This paper and the preceding paper, from a soon to be published book, Education for a Sustainable Future: A Paradigm of Hope, edited by Keith A. Wheeler, focus on the need to have science imbedded at the core of the education for sustainability paradigm and the need to increase and enhance teacher education to better be able to develop the necessary interdisciplinary thinking and transformative learning for the new millenium.

From environmental education to Education for Sustainable Development in Germany

Abstract: This contribution analyses the development of educational efforts to engage with ideas about the position of humans within the environment. It seeks answers to the question: in which ways and intensity can educational work in schools match different stages of general societal discussions on environmental problems? It is often said that school and school teaching suffer from a general ‘cultural lag’—that is, that they lag behind current social problems. It is argued in this article that there is a remarkable parallelism between public discussion of environmental issues and their consideration in school teaching. This analysis goes back to the roots of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Contrary to some current positions, it is argued here that ESD not only has roots in nature protection education and environmental education, but also that it goes beyond those roots. The article starts with a short overview on environmental education policy in Germany that complements the accounts of programmes an...

Drama and Environment: Joining Forces to Engage Children and Young People in Environmental Education.

Abstract: Engaging and exciting students about the environment remains a challenge in contemporary society, even while objective measures show the rapid state of the world's environment declining. To illuminate the integration of drama and environmental education as a means of engaging students in environmental issues, the work of performance companies Evergreen Theatre, Leapfish and Eaton Gorge Theatre Company, the ecological oratorio Plague and the Moonflower, and a school-based trial of play-building were examined through survey data and participant observations. These case studies employed drama in different ways — theatre-in-education, play-building, and large-scale performance event. The four case studies provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for drama-based activities leading to an improvement in knowledge about the environment and understandings about the consequences of one's actions. In observing and participating in these case studies, we reflect that drama is a means of synthesising and presenting scientific research in ways that are creative and multi-layered, and which excite students, helping maintain their attention and facilitating their engagement.

Learning about environments : The significance of primal landscapes

Abstract: The way we learn about our environments—be they farms, forests, or tribal lands—has implications for the formulation of environmental policy. This article presents the findings of how residents learned about their environments in two rural case studies conducted in northern Queensland and relates these to the concept of “primal landscapes,” which is concerned with the interaction that occurs between children and the environments in which they mature. Rather than focusing specifically on built environments or natural environments, the article draws on an approach that conceptualizes environment as meaning-laden places in which we live and work, which integrate social, cultural, biological, physical, and economic dimensions. In drawing insights for environmental policy, the article draws attention to the timing of policy interventions, the significance of experiential environmental education, the potential to learn from place-based festivals, and the importance of learning from extreme events such as fires and floods.