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Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
ISBN 0 868 57655 7
Originally Environmental Protection in Australia: A Professional Development Workshop Manual for Teachers was published as a book and distributed to educators working in professional development and teacher education at workshops held in all the state capitals in 1996.
This WWW version has been published to provide a wide range of people access to the material. Additionally, the ability to download the workshop modules onto a disk will enable workshop facilitators to make changes to or adapt the modules to suit the needs and interests of their workshop participants.
The uploading of Environmental Protection in Australia: A Professional Development Workshop Manual onto the WWW has been made possible with funding from the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories.
There is a high level of concern from many sectors about environmental problems in Australia today. The impacts of urbanisation and urban lifestyles on soil, air, water and vegetation are obvious to all. However, just as there are many types of environmental problems, each with their own causes, so there are also a wide range of solutions.
We have moved away today from the need to teach young people about the nature or causes of environmental problems. The task of consciousness-raising of the last twenty years in environmental education has, by and large, been successfully completed and, as a result of this, 'environment' now figures among the mainstream policies of all major political parties in Australia.
However, implementing solutions to environmental problems is another matter. The scale and severity of many environmental problems are often daunting - and experts differ in their opinions about which problems to tackle first and what sort of solutions are the best.
Problem-solving has always been a difficult business. That is why some have said that for every problem facing us there is an easy solution - and it is usually the wrong one - while others have argued that the clever solutions to today's environmental problems are often the causes of tomorrow's problems.
The best solution to any problem is always prevention. In medicine, public health authorities advocate primary health care and preventative medicine ahead of the costly, painful and often tragic effects of trying to heal people with preventable diseases. Similarly with the environment, prevention is the best cure. Environmental protection measures are always likely to be safer, cheaper and more successful than trying to clean our air and water after they have become polluted, clean the land after a toxic leak, or compensate people for the effects of ill-sited or technologically-outdated industrial operations.
The workshop modules in this manual have been developed for professional development facilitators and teacher educators to help them provide teachers with knowledge and skills to teach about those environmental concerns that are commonly called 'brown issues'. These include the environmental health related issues facing the majority of Australians who live in cities and towns: air and water quality, chemical risks and waste management.
'Brown issues' are often easier to prevent or resolve than the more emotionally charged 'green issues' of, for example, forest conservation versus logging, coastal protection versus tourism developments or dams versus 'wild rivers'. Very often, the environmental problems we know as 'brown issues' can be prevented or their impacts minimised through a range of personal and community actions. The '4R' motto of waste management of 'reduce, reuse, recycle and remove' is an example of this. However, many 'brown issues' also require careful planning and legislation as their scale of impact and causes are often beyond the scope of individual lifestyle changes and local community actions to prevent or resolve. As a result, environmental protection tools such as environmental audits, environmental impact assessment and cleaner production have been developed. Very few resources for curriculum or professional development exist to support teaching about these 'brown issues' or about these environmental protection tools.
Environmental education in Australia has developed from a strong base in ecology and has traditionally focused on the very important 'green issues' of endangered species, nature conservation and forests. Recent developments have also seen a range of curriculum and professional development initiatives to promote environmental education about agricultural concerns, especially through Landcare education, and about global environment and development issues. These approaches to environmental education have helped create the new Key Learning Area of Studies of Society and the Environment in which ecological and social sciences are taught in an interdisciplinary way.
However, environmental education in Australia has tended to neglect the urban environment and the role of science, technology and engineering in preventing or, at least, minimising environmental problems.
The manual Environmental Protection in Australia: A Professional Development Workshop Manual for Teachers has been developed to provide those responsible for teacher education - both initial pre-service teacher preparation and continuous inservice professional development - with some tools for ensuring that today's teachers have a wide range of concepts, examples and teaching skills in order to share the importance of environmental protection with their students.
The workshop modules will be of value in professional development work for teachers of Studies of Society and the Environment. However, the workshops have also been written to provide assistance to professional development leaders in the other environmentally focused Key Learning Areas of Science, Technology and Health.
In particular, the workshop modules focus on developing the following objectives with teachers: