Environment Australia, January 1999
Section 4
Environmental Education and the Federal Environment and Heritage Portfolio:
The mission of the Environment and Heritage Portfolio is to ensure that sustainable development objectives are achieved in Australia - in other words, achieving national environmental goals in harmony with other important social and economic goals.
Educational activity is an essential component of the Portfolio's efforts to fulfil its mission. Educational products and services are generated across the Portfolio to complement the programs being implemented.
These products and services cover a wide range of activities and target audiences, from multi-faceted programs focussed on community education (such as publicity about Natural Heritage Trust projects), to reporting functions with a strong educational element (like State of the Environment Reporting), to collaborative programs with an implicit educational element (such as the Greenhouse Challenge Program).
Increasingly, the Portfolio is directed to building interest and capacity among community groups for developing their own solutions to environmental problems. The Portfolio seeks to provide access to the information and skills required to take effective action.
Elements of this approach include:
- developing awareness and interest in environmental issues through communication and the 'marketing' of ideas and values;
- building capacity to address those issues through improved levels of information, expertise and skills, at the same time building communities of interest and establishing relationships between them; and
- providing resources and support to enable action to be taken to ameliorate or resolve problems.
In addition, the Portfolio is involved in the dissemination of educational materials (kits, videos, poster series, fact sheets, signage etc) for use by formal educators and students, business and industry groups, non-government organisations, and the wider community.
The Portfolio is often directly involved in the delivery process of education by administering, funding or otherwise supporting activities increasing environmental competencies and the capacity for better environmental management. These include training or workshops for individuals or groups, support for educational programs in schools such as the international science and education GLOBE Program, and specific assistance with course development.
Review of Educational Activity:
Analysis of Programs:
As part of the preparation of this Discussion Paper, the Department of the Environment and Heritage conducted a Portfolio-wide review of its educational activities. The review categorised activities by:
- function (resource materials, public awareness raising, capacity building),
- target audience (as per the providers listed in the previous chapter); and
- broad subject coverage (biodiversity, climate change, heritage, land, marine, urban, inland water, and general).
While the results are only indicative, they provide some useful insights.
The type of educational activity being pursued varies across the Portfolio. Some areas have a heavy emphasis on raising public awareness, whereas others place much more emphasis on capacity building.
In terms of the overall emphasis of Portfolio educational activity, more work is being done in the area of public awareness raising than in capacity building, although this emphasis is changing.
The target audiences of different areas also vary. Overall, there is a greater emphasis on business and industry, peak bodies and community groups. To a lesser extent, Local Government and formal education are targeted. Less activity is directed towards early childhood education, vocational education and training, environmental non-government organisations, and the home. Relative to the activities involving Local Government, little emphasis is placed on education activity involving State governments or other federal agencies.
These findings need to be interpreted carefully, and they do not, in themselves, necessarily reveal shortcomings. Variation in the preferred functions and target audiences across the Environment and Heritage Portfolio is to be reasonably expected. The heavy emphasis on community groups is, for example, directly associated with the Natural Heritage Trust, and its heavy emphasis on 'on-ground' works involving community-based organisations.
That said, the results of the study do provide a lead to how the Portfolio's educational effort could be further improved.
For example:
- there is scope for better coordination within the Portfolio and with other government and non-government bodies;
- even more emphasis could be placed on capacity building;
- market research could be used more to design and evaluate the effectiveness of programs;
- some activities could be better directed and would be more effective if there was access to more educational expertise;
- the Portfolio could act as a catalyst for more educational activity in various areas but particularly in vocational education and training, early childhood education, environmental non-government organisations, and in Australian households;
- there is scope for more cooperation between the Portfolio and other sectors; and
- increased awareness and capacity building amongst the media offers a significant opportunity with the potential to help improve the coverage of environmental issues.
Improving Environmental Education in the Commonwealth Environment and Heritage Portfolio:
To enhance the Portfolio's performance and capacity to provide national leadership in environmental education, a number of objectives and associated strategies have been identified.
Objective: To improve the effectiveness of the Portfolio's own educational activities.
Strategies:
- establish a body comprising environmental education experts to advise the Minister and Portfolio on the effectiveness of Portfolio education activity;
- establish a Portfolio Education Steering Group (PESG) with responsibility to evaluate and improve the Portfolio's educational activities through better coordination, less duplication, greater use of environmental expertise, more effective targeting of products and services, and performance measurement;
- use market research more widely to analyse and evaluate the impact of current educational activities, and to help inform the design and targeting of future programs;
- further upgrade the Australian Environmental Education Network (AEEN) web site to increase ease of access, usage and knowledge of materials available;
Objective: To encourage the integration and coordination of environmental education activities within and across sectors.
Strategies:
- foster a whole of government approach to environmental education at the Commonwealth level by establishing an inter-departmental committee to exchange ideas and maintain linkages between the various environmental education activities occurring in Commonwealth Departments;
- develop partnerships in environmental education with State and Territory authorities;
- support the inclusion of environmental issues in major conferences;
Objective: To improve the effectiveness of the environmental education activities of specific sectors.
Strategies:
Formal education
- include a component for the formal education sector in all relevant Portfolio environmental education activities;
- in conjunction with education authorities, foster the provision of appropriate support for teachers and the inclusion of relevant materials in primary and secondary curricula;
- extend GLOBE schools training on a state-by-state basis to week-long development conferences for teachers and trainee teachers, offering credentialling in GLOBE, Waterwatch and other relevant program areas;
- develop partnerships with tertiary education institutions to provide short courses designed to increase environmental expertise (including the development of courses/units for regional facilitators, coordinators, and leaders at the community group level), along with other initiatives developed in conjunction with these institutions;
Governments
- expand the Environment Resource Officer program to boost the environmental education capacity of Local Government;
- in partnership with local governments, improve facilitator training programs under Local Agenda 21 programs to ensure the highest level of effectiveness;
Business and industry
- identify and publicise to wider audiences examples of the most effective educational initiatives associated with current programs;
- pilot and promote appropriate workplaces as models in vocational education and training in sustainability;
Community groups
- through networks developed under the Natural Heritage Trust, other programs and local government agencies, expand sponsorship of adult learning processes, such as non award courses, learning circles and the development of regional sustainable management programs;
- recognise and strengthen the role of non government organisations in environmental education and provide more effectively for this role in funding agreements;
General
- establish a series of appropriate benchmarks against which progress can be measured and reported, and disseminate reporting handbooks for the use of the relevant sectoral agencies and groups.
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