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.

A Modified NEP/DSP Environmental Attitudes Scale

Abstract: The relationship between people and the rest of nature is central to the debate concerning the management of natural resources. An understanding of how environmental concern is reflected in people's attittudes and value systems is important for the development of responsive environmental management. Effective attitude measures already exist, most notably the New Environmental Paradigm scale. Since this measure was produced, however, certain issues not addressed by the scale have become increasingly important within the environmental debate. These include concepts such as the intrinsic value of nature, or the moral duties of humans to the rest of nature-issues that surface repeatedly in the environmental literature. The study has shown that it is possible to include references to the intrinsic value of nature, as well as the moral duties people have to the rest of nature and to other human beings, within a reliable and unidimensional attitude scale.

Development of a Metric to Test Group Differences in Ecological Knowledge as One Component of Environmental Literacy

Abstract: Environmental literacy has been defined in numerous ways and attempts have been made to measure how environmentally literate people are. Many attempts to measure literacy have instead measured people's knowledge about pollution and their attitudes toward the environment. According to many environmental education experts, knowledge and attitudes are important components of environmental literacy, especially if the goal of environmental education is to change behavior. However, the experts also indicate that, to change an individual's behavior, knowledge about the environment must be associated with environmental sensitivity, personal beliefs, and decisionmaking and problem-solving skills. The research presented in this article contributes to environmental literacy research by offering a tested, valid survey instrument to measure ecological knowledge—one component of environmental literacy. In this article, we provide an example of how this instrument can be applied by comparing knowledge levels am...

Between Knowing What Is Right and Knowing that Is It Wrong to Tell Others What Is Right: On Relativism, Uncertainty and Democracy in Environmental and Sustainability Education.

Abstract: This contribution provides an ‘outside’ commentary on several of the articles provided in this special issue on environmental education and education in the context of sustainability in Denmark and Sweden. Although there is no uniform position or shared single outlook expressed in the articles in this special issue, there are some re‐current tendencies that may have received less attention elsewhere in the world but clearly are in need of further investigation there as well. These tendencies are delicately intertwined and include: (1) a concern for democracy and participation minimally distorted by inevitable power imbalances; (2) a commitment to solidarity and preservation of the public good, including the outdoors; (3) a privileging of transactional and dialogical forms of meaning‐making characterized by indeterminism and co‐creation; (4) the need to reflect on and expose the, often‐times, implicit normativity of education in general and of education for sustainable development in particular. It is sugg...

Environmental education and the issue of nature

Abstract: Much official environmental education policy in the UK and elsewhere makes scant reference to nature as such, and the issue of our underlying attitude towards it is rarely addressed. For the most part such policy is preoccupied with the issue of meeting ‘sustainably’ what are taken to be present and future human needs. This paper considers a range of issues posed by this anthropocentric approach and will explore the view that environmental education -- indeed any education -- worthy of the name needs to bring a range of searching questions concerning nature to the attention of learners, and to encourage them to develop their own on-going responses to them. It is argued that our present environmental predicament not only provides an exciting opportunity to re-focus education on the issue of our relationship to nature, but positively requires the exploration of this issue for its long term resolution. Extensive implications for the curriculum and the culture of the school are raised.