International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education

Robert B. Stevenson, Michael Brody, Justin Dillon, Arjen E.J. Wals, Robert B. Stevenson, Michael Brody, Justin Dillon, Arjen E.J. Wals

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415892384
• eBook ISBN: 9781136699306
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

The environment and contested notions of sustainability are increasingly topics of public interest, political debate, and legislation across the world. Environmental education journals now publish research from a wide variety of methodological traditions that show linkages between the environment, health, development, and education. The growth in scholarship makes this an opportune time to review and synthesize the knowledge base of the environmental education (EE) field.

The purpose of this 51-chapter handbook is not only to illuminate the most important concepts, findings and theories that have been developed by EE research, but also to critically examine the historical progression of the field, its current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the EE research agenda, and where that agenda might be headed.

Published for the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

1 Introduction

An Orientation to Environmental Education and the Handbook

Robert B. Stevenson

James Cook University, Australia

Arjen E. J. Wals

Wageningen University, The Netherlands; Cornell University, USA

Justin Dillon

King’s College London, UK

Michael Brody

Montana State University, USA

DOI: 10.4324/9780203813331-1

Although the field of environmental education (EE) has a history of over forty years—and much longer if forerunners such as nature study, outdoor and conservation education are included—it has received considerably more attention in recent years as contested notions of environment and sustainability have become common topics of conversation among the public, the subject of media interest, and the focus of much political debate and legislation. Systemic linkages between environment, health, climate, poverty, development, and education have become more widely accepted as the years have passed. Therefore, this handbook was developed at an opportune time to take stock of and consolidate what we know and don’t know as a field, and to demarcate the limits of our (un)certainties. More specifically, the purpose of the handbook is not only to illuminate the most important understandings that have been developed by environmental education research, but also to critically examine the ways in which the field has changed over the decades, the current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the environmental education research agenda, and where that agenda might and could be headed in the future. Environmental education as a field of inquiry is conceptualized from a range of vantage points, including historical, theoretical, and ethical perspectives; discourse, policy, curriculum, learning, and assessment are examined from an EE-perspective; and key issues are raised of framing, doing, and assessing the missing voices in environmental education research.

Characteristics of Environmental Education

Before discussing the structure, processes of development, and ways of engaging with the handbook, for those new to the field, we first offer a brief background on some conceptions and characteristics of environmental education.

An early (hence the sexist language) and often quoted (particularly in Europe and Australia) definition of environmental education states that:

Environmental education is a process of recognizing values and clarifying concepts in order to develop skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate the interrelatedness among man, his culture and his biophysical surroundings. Environmental education also entails practice in decision-making and self-formulating of a code of behaviour about issues concerning environmental quality. (Martin, 1975, p. 21)

Following the establishment of the United Nations Environment Program, a workshop of environmental educators from UNESCO countries produced the Belgrade Charter which identified the goal of EE as:

To develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and prevention of new ones.

The notable addition to earlier conceptions of EE was an emphasis on action, which was reinforced in a later intergovernmental conference in Tbilisi. Besides developing critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making skills in relation to quality-of-life issues, the Tbilisi Declaration emphasized that students should be “actively involved at all levels in working toward the resolution of environmental problems” (Tbilisi Declaration, 1978, p. 18).

In the late 1980s new discourses or slogans of sustainable development and sustainability which emerged in international policy circles gave rise to education for sustainable development (ESD) and education for sustainability (EfS), which have come to replace environmental education as the dominant discourse in the most national policy arenas. However, the ambiguities and multiple interpretations of these terms have been the subject of much analysis and debate among scholars in the field. For a more detailed history of the field and some of the contested terrain of its formulation, see Gough (1997). In summary, the conceptions emerging from these conferences and promulgated in policy documents have been influential in shaping the discourse, conceptualizing the field and providing a source of debate on a range of issues for theory and practice—many of which are examined in the following chapters in this handbook.

Among many characteristics that have been identified as associated with environmental (or sustainability) education, we emphasize five characteristics on which there seems to be broad consensus—albeit with multiple interpretations—and which have important implications for conceptualizing and constructing research in the field. First, environmental education embraces normative questions as environmental issues are fundamentally normative or value-laden by nature, as Jickling and Wals point out in their introduction to Section 2 of this handbook. Second, the interdisciplinary nature of people-society-environment relationships compels environmental education to be interdisciplinary: a position which is explicitly articulated in the “triple bottom line” discourse of sustainable development and sustainability referencing environmental, sociocultural, and economic dimensions. Third, environmental education is concerned not only with knowledge and understanding, and attitudes and values, but also includes developing the agency of learners in participating and taking action on environmental and sustainability issues. Education traditionally equips students to understand, and at best conceptualize, problems, but rarely to enact solutions (Shawcross & Robinson, Chapter 24). Fourth, the field encompasses education and learning that not only takes place within formal institutional settings but also within nonformal or informal public domain settings (Hart & Nolan, 1999). The boundaries between these settings, however, are beginning to break down, an issue we discuss in the final concluding chapter. Finally, environmental education has both a global and local orientation given that the scale of environmental issues ranges from the local to the global.

The History and Purpose of the Handbook

Once dominated by a small group of empirical-analytical researchers publishing in the Journal of Environmental Education, a relatively small circulation North American journal founded in 1969, there are now a number of journals across the world publishing research from a wide variety of traditions and drawing on multiple methodologies. Although still an emerging field, we believe—and the AERA Books Editorial Board clearly agreed—that the scope, sophistication, and richness of the scholarship of environmental education warranted the production of a first International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education. This richness is reflected in the scholarship presented in the following chapters by a diverse group of international researchers who are both mindful and critical of various histories of environmental education research and the work of those who have contributed to their creation.

This International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education, following AERA’s educational research handbook guidelines, offers a current “state-of-the-art” assessment of the substance and robustness of the knowledge base derived from relevant areas of inquiry in this field and is intended to provide a foundation for advancing the thinking of scholars and students about future directions for environmental education research. It attempts to provide a comprehensive treatment of major current lines of research on environmental education and its close relatives (education for sustainability, sustainability education, and education for sustainable development) and to examine the relationship of environmental education research to educational research in general and educational research in particular that overlaps, intersects, or borders with environmental education (i.e. educational research focusing on science, social studies, health, development, social justice, citizenship, peace, and conflict). However, as several section editors in their introduction make clear, any history of a field represents only a snapshot of the many histories that could be created and reflect the perspectives of those whose voices are included.

Contributions include philosophically and empirically grounded research (of all genres) that critically examines the conceptualization, discourses, policies, programs, processes, structures, and research approaches to environmental education in the broadest sense. The handbook attempts to be comprehensive by addressing histories, contexts, methodologies, ontologies, epistemologies, and literacies that help establish the knowledge base of research on environmental education at a metalevel, and identifies possible futures and future directions of environmental education research.

Over the years environmental education has been researched by scholars who bring a variety of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) perspectives to the field, among them education and its subnelds (e.g., educational psychology, sociology of education, curriculum studies), environmental and natural sciences (e.g., biology, ecology), and environmental social sciences (e.g., environmental psychology, sociology, and philosophy). One of our missions in this volume was to bring together divergent perspectives, methodologies, methods, and findings of this broad community of scholars. Too often their work fails to cross borders and expand the horizons of those working in contiguous fields.

Contributors were encouraged, as much as possible, to make explicit and critically examine the assumptions underlying their perspective or particular vantage point, and to address how these assumptions might shape their contribution. This reflexivity hopefully makes the text more transformative in that contributions have been written in such a way that we hope you, the reader, can engage with the text meaningfully, allowing you to distill your own lessons learned and to mirror them with your own assumptions, knowledge base, and experience. Inevitably, of course, section editors have brought their own ideas about what it means to operate at a metalevel or to be a “reflexive writer” or to create a text that is “transformative,” but we hope that this emphasis has produced a handbook that is neither a “show-and-tell” text, nor a collection of “best-practices” (nor viewed as the definitive work on environmental education research). Rather, we intend for the book to do justice to this still evolving field with, as Annette Gough states in her introduction to the first section, its somewhat “fuzzy boundaries” and multiple “interpretations of its foundations and documents.” We also hope that the handbook is engaging, and that it invites and inspires readers to participate in reflecting on their own interpretations of these newly created, as well as past, textual documentations of the field and in determining future directions of the field.

The Process of Development of the Handbook

A handbook of this size and scope obviously entails a long and elaborated process of gestation and production. An outline of this process can help reveal the strengths and limitations of the final product. First, an extensive process of consultation and collaboration with numerous experienced and new environmental education scholars around the world preceded the development of a proposal for the handbook. A series of meetings were arranged and held in 2006 and 2007 at international environmental education research conferences on three different continents (2006 and 2007 meetings in North America of the Ecological & Environmental Education SIG at the AERA annual conference and the research symposium of the North American Association of Environmental Education conference, the World Environmental Education Congress in South Africa, and the Invitational Seminar on Research in Environmental and Health Education in Switzerland). These meetings led to an agreed need for and vision of a handbook on environmental education research and helped identify the editorial team, a supporting advisory group, and potential contributors. The Ecological & Environmental Education (now the Environmental Education) SIG was particularly central during these times to the development and support of the handbook as it was envisaged from early on to be an AERA publication. Meetings were then held with the AERA Books Editorial Board to discuss the idea of the proposed handbook before a formal prospectus was developed. Discussions of potential inclusions and issues being faced were held and reports on progress were presented each year at the business meeting of the Ecological & Environmental Education at the AERA annual meeting throughout the development process.

A call for contributors was widely distributed in September 2007, including to participants at the above conferences and members of major environmental education professional associations around the world. Proposals were invited for either: (1) a section that focuses on a broad research topic or issue and included a number of chapters addressing that topic or issue; or (2) individual chapters on a specific research topic or issue. Contributions were sought of conceptually and/or empirically grounded research (of all genres) that critically examined the conceptualization, discourses, policies, programs, processes, structures, and research approaches to environmental education (and education for sustainable development or sustainability). Eleven potential areas were identified by the editors, in consultation with a group of editorial advisors, to provide some guidelines for contributors as to possible topics and issues for both section and chapter proposals (and provide an approximation of the envisaged size and scope of the handbook), but other topics or issues identified by contributors also were invited. These eleven were not envisaged as necessarily representing the final structure or sections of the handbook and in fact the final structure was reduced to nine sections. These eleven (now nine) areas were organized within three broad themes of: conceptualizing EE as a field of inquiry; EE curriculum, teaching, assessment, and learning: processes and outcomes; and issues of framing, doing, and assessing EE research.

Interested contributors were invited to forward detailed abstracts (500 words) of their proposals. Over eighty individual chapter proposals and three proposals for whole sections were received. Proposals were submitted from authors on six continents with approximately equal numbers from Australasia (all but one from Australia), Europe, and North America. Six proposals each were received from Africa (all from South Africa) and Asia, but only two from South America. Unfortunately, many of the submitted proposals were very specific and focused on individual studies that were more suited to journal articles than to a broader chapter within a handbook of research. A first review of proposals by the editors identified thirty-nine individual chapter proposals that were considered possibilities for expansion of the abstract into full papers. Additional contributors, who had not submitted proposals, were then identified who either were known and respected for their scholarship in particular areas within the tentative handbook framework or could address evident gaps. Invited proposals focused in particular on the two sections in which there was a lack of proposals, namely Analyses of EE Discourses and Policies and Research on Learning Processes in EE, which were not surprising given that these are areas that researchers have noted as receiving limited attention in the field (Rickinson, 2001; Stevenson, 2006). In two other sections there was also a lack of individual proposals but we were fortunate in receiving section proposals for which the section editors invited contributors. These were environmental conceptions, philosophies and ethics that situate the environmental in EE research (subsequently renamed Normative dimensions of environmental education research) and methodological issues in doing research (subsequently renamed philosophies and methodologies of environmental education research). These two sections focused on conceptions/philosophies of education and environmental ethics in the first case, and philosophical and methodological conceptualizations of approaches to environmental education research in the second. The absence of individual proposals in these two areas of inquiry was perhaps more surprising, although the number of scholars working in them is relatively small.

After considering these invited contributors and addressing overlap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: An Orientation to Environmental Education and the Handbook
• Part A. Conceptualizing Environmental Education as a Field of Inquiry
• Part B. Research on Environmental Education Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment: Processes and Outcomes
• Part C. Issues of Framing, Doing, and Assessing in Environmental Education Research
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• The Editors
• The Contributors