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Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
ISBN 0 868 57655 7
The audiences for the workshops in this manual are both students studying pre-service teacher education courses and experienced teachers involved in continuing or inservice education. Thus, the materials may be of value to workshop facilitators engaged in professional development activities in colleges and universities, professional associations, education systems, teachers' centres, community environment organisations, and schools.
The workshops have been written with the needs of lecturers and other workshop facilitators in mind. Thus, the activities have been phrased in terms of things that the workshop facilitator needs to consider doing when planning and leading a workshop.
Each workshop has a common format, which includes the following headings and sections, as appropriate.
Brief rationale and background information
The objectives of the workshop
A brief overview of the major components of the workshop
Organised in categories, as below, as appropriate:
A. Provided
B. To be obtained by workshop facilitator
A bibliography of materials used by the author in writing the workshop and which could prove useful for facilitators seeking additional background information.
These are always written in the form of instructions for workshop facilitators. This section provides direct suggestions and refers the facilitator to the resources in the workshop module and explains how they can be used.
Generally, each activity is based upon a concrete learning experience which requires participants to work individually, in pairs or small groups to complete a task. Thus, the workshops promote active experiential approaches to learning and model the sorts of learning experiences that can achieve the wide range of knowledge, skill, values and participation objectives of environmental education. Lecture-style input is kept to a minimum and always referred to as a 'mini-lecture'.
The workshops are generally presented in three phases:
The workshops in this manual generally provide all the materials that are required to conduct the workshop. Where this is not the case, the additional materials that the facilitator needs to obtain and prepare are listed (as in section 4B above).
However, because the modules are not 'recipes', two points should be noted:
Other resources may be added to the workshops.
The authors have prepared the workshops assuming that only overhead projectors and some form of printing or photocopying are available. Where additional resources are available, workshop facilitators are encouraged to integrate various audiovisual materials such as slides, videos and educational television programmes into their versions of the workshops. This will greatly enrich the experiences and learning of participants. Alternatively, instead of making overhead transparencies, some facilitators may choose to make charts and posters of some or all of the display material provided as overhead transparency masters.
The key word in the use of the workshop modules in this manual is flexibility. Workshop facilitators are strongly encouraged to use the workshop materials and activities as guides only. The more facilitators adapt, change, revise and add to the prepared workshops, the happier the workshop authors and editors of this manual will be. Indeed, it is vital to the success of the workshops that the outcomes, materials and activities be adapted to suit the educational and cultural contexts in which they are being used.
The workshops may be used in a great many ways and combinations. However, it should be noted that Workshop 1 on Protecting our Environment, was written to be introductory. It provides an overview of the themes addressed in detail in the other seven workshops, and seeks to illustrate the relationships between them.
Workshop 2, Workshop 3, Workshop 4 and Workshop 5 address various aspects of the causes and ways of preventing air pollution, water pollution, waste management and chemical risk problems, respectively. Each of these modules treats the problems in a positive way with a focus on the ways in which personal and community actions, legislation, planning and the application of technology can prevent or minimise the impacts of the particular problems.
Workshop 6, Workshop 7 and Workshop 8 focus on three environmental protection tools - environmental auditing, environmental impact assessment and cleaner production.
Probably the most common way in which the workshop modules will be used will be as 'one-off' activities incorporated into an in-service or pre-service education course being conducted for a particular group of teachers. This may be as part of an afternoon or weekend in-service workshop or may be when a lecturer in pre-service teacher education, e.g. in a science, geography or technology course, chooses to use one of the workshops (preferably an adapted version) to teach a particular concept or teaching skill relevant to the course.
Second, several of the workshops could be used as an integrated set - again, preferably, with local adaptations - for a core or elective course/subject/programme in environmental education. This approach may be most desirable if it is feared that the infusion approach may lead to the duplication of some topics and the omissions of others or some participants missing out altogether.
Third, the materials may be used as the basis for a linked programme of professional and curriculum development for teacher education staff. Familiarisation with the concepts developed in these workshops and the experiential learning strategies common to them may provide new skills for facilitators and give them new ideas for their existing courses and programmes.
The workshops have been written to facilitate their use in any of these ways.
