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.

Rural-Urban Differences in Environmental Knowledge and Actions

Abstract: Greater awareness of between-group variation in environmental attitudes and knowledge will improve the quality of environmental education programs. The authors examined environmental characteristic differences between rural and urban residents, using telephone survey data from a sample of Kentucky River Basin residents. Although they expected that the more urban and metropolitan an individual, the greater would be the individual's environmental world view, concern, knowledge, and actions, they found no consistent differences by residence in these characteristics. They did find differences by education and income. They concluded that the success of environmental education depends on its participation in promoting equity in the general population.

The new biophilia: An exploration of visions of nature in Western countries

Abstract: Summary Visions of nature are the subject of much philosophical and policy debate. The present paper focuses, however, on the visions of nature held by people not professionally involved in the issue, namely those of the general public. These visions constitute the democratic basis of environmental conservation and the frame for effective two-way communication between professionals and communities on nature protection and management. It appears that the general public in Europe and the USA has developed a strong general ‘biophilia’ (nature-friendliness). One indicator of this is that in quantitative research, 70‐90% of the population recognize the right of nature to exist even if not useful to humans in any way. In qualitative research settings, lay people reveal a remarkable richness and depth of views and experiences of nature. A quantitative survey on images and values of nature, and a qualitative study consisting of in-depth interviews on the relationship between childhood experiences in nature and adult visions of nature were conducted in the Netherlands. A factor analysis revealed a classification of types of nature, which included ‘wild nature’, ‘arcadian nature’, ‘penetrative nature’ and other such images that, with wild nature in the lead, were ascribed a smoothly decreasing degree of naturalness. Asked to rank the values and functions of nature, the top three were formed by the value for human health, the intrinsic value and the value for future generations. In the qualitative interviews, indications were found that more intense childhood experiences with nature could be associated with later ascription of a high degree of naturalness to wild nature, and less intense experiences with later ascription of a high degree of naturalness to arcadian nature. Many significant experiences took place beyond the reach of parental supervision. Findings such as these are of obvious relevance for environmental education and the design of ‘experiential nature’ in and around protected areas. Social science research concerning nature protection is often triggered by frictions between local people and protected area authorities. Such situations tend to be dominated by the airing of grievances, demands for economic compensation and so on, and these then also tend to dominate the research findings. Taking place away from these specific hot spots of conflict, social science research of the types discussed in this paper shows that many nonconflictual lines of communication are open for nature protection agencies.

School Environmental Education Programme Impacts upon Student and Family Learning: A case study analysis

Abstract: This article uses a case study approach to explore the impact of two school environmental education programmes, from the perspective of participating students, their teachers and their parents A total of 152 students (79 from primary schools and 73 from a secondary school), 3 teachers and 62 parents contributed their perceptions regarding the impact of the programmes Each programme is described in detail and students' responses compared across the two programmes and across different class groups participating in each programme It is concluded that both programmes were successful in engaging students in thinking and learning about environmental issues, although some programme features were more likely than others to lead to impacts beyond the bounds of the classroom Recommendations are made regarding those features that need to be included in school environmental education programmes in order to maximise student and family learning outcomes

Knowing about Environmental Knowing: The Current State of Theory and Research on Environmental Cognition

Abstract: This paper reviews the 15 years of concentrated research on environmental cognition, including recent developments in theory construction. Included are discussions on the content of environmental representations, cognitive mapping, environmental meaning and symbolism, individual and group differences, eplanatory variables, differences due to characteristics of the physical environment, and the role of environmental cognition in urban spatial behavior. It is argued that people remember buildings less for their architectural form than for their use significance, that people conceive of cities in terms of basic dichotomies of human experiences, that environmental meaning and symbolism are more im-portant in experience than concrete aspects of orientation and cognitive mapping, that developmental changes occur in a stage-sequence pattern, that with increasing mobility peoples images of the environment shift from social and physical conceptions to symbolic conceptions, and that a complete explanation of enviro...