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Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
Edward Errington
University of Otago
New Zealand
Ian Robottom
Deakin University
Australia
It is generally agreed that the most important and challenging kind of environmental education is 'education for the environment' in which teachers and students engage in critical studies of environmental issues in their own locality This kind of environmental education entails critique of the assumptions and values underlying alternative and often opposing proposals for action in respect of environmental issues. There are a number of requisite conditions to 'education for the environment', for example:
This workshop illustrates an instance of community-based education for the environment, explores some of the different meanings embedded in material designed with education for the environment in mind, and invites participants to consider some of the practical and theoretical implications of adopting this approach to environmental education in their own educational settings.
It is expected that participants in this workshop will:
The workshop will involve participants in small groups in constructing a number of alternative interpretive accounts of an instance of 'education for the environment' depicted in a series of photographs. These constructed accounts will be compared with an 'original' commentary with a view to illustrating how easy it is to adopt a non-politicised view of environmental education.
The workshop will also take a look at some of the literature on critical community-based environmental education, and work towards an improved set of principles qualifying 'education for the environment'.
Overhead Transparency Masters
OHT 1: Three Approaches to Environmental Education
OHT 2: Workshop Objectives
OHT 3: Education for the Environment
OHT 4: Professional Development in Environmental Education
Resources
Resource 1: The Environmental Education and Computer Conference Project: Two Case Studies
Reading
Reading 1: Five Principles for Professional Development in Environmental Education.
Boal, A. (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed (trans. C. A. and M. O. A. McBride), Urizen Books, New York.
Robottom, I. and Muhlebach, R. (1989) Expanding the Scientific Community in Schools: A Computer Conference in Science Education, Australian Science Teachers Journal , 35 (1), 39-47.
Schreuder, D. (1994) The Schools Water Project (SWAP): A Case Study of an Action Research and Community Problem Solving Approach to Environmental Education, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 10, 35-46.
Wagner, G. (1979) Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium, Hutchison, London.
In this warm-up activity, environmental concerns are 'auctioned' to identify the environmental concerns most worrying the participants.
Educational drama is one way of responding to analytical questions such as these in a concrete and practical way. Educational drama may provide a useful way of transcending cultural barriers in environmental education. The drama methods selected for this workshop have been used successfully in South America, Europe and China (see Boal 1979; Wagner 1979).
Participants work in groups of 5-6 and require their copies of the case studies in Resource 1.
A. Create a 'Tableau' to Represent the Message in a Chosen Image
B. Creating a 'Tableau' to Represent an Alternative Message of the Chosen Image
C. Displaying and Analysing the Tableau
Participants have now had an opportunity for assessing the above activities in terms of their feasibility in educational settings.
We are proposing a self-evaluation in the form of an appraisal of the above experience in terms of the sense in which it is consistent with the principles of professional development in environmental education set out by Ian Robottom (1987) in Reading 1.
Education About the Environment
Education In the Environment
Education for the Environment
For environmental education to be education for the environment, there needs to be:
Professional development in environmental education should be:
1. Enquiry-based
2. Participatory and Practice-based
3. Critical
4. Community-based
5. Collaborative
Introduction
The project illustrated here was coordinated by Deakin University, involved five coastal schools, and had three interactive characteristics:
(i) environmental education work involving monitoring of water quality;
(ii) a computer conference as a forum for participating schools to interact with each other, sharing opinions, inquiries and results with Australian and overseas schools engaged in similar water quality work; and
(iii) a participatory research approach on the part of the project coordinators, teachers and students.
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1. Although this project originally involved schools along the 'west coast' of Victoria, similar experiences have been reported in other countries (eg. USA and South Africa). Each school enjoys proximity to a magnificent marine setting, but their environmental education activities were initially concerned with freshwater quality. This case study reports on the activities of three of the five schools. |
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2. Case Study 1 |
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3. The school conducted tests of nine different parameters of water quality. |
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4. Students in different year levels were involved in the sample and analysis of the water. Here, some Year 10 students receive preliminary instructions from their teacher prior to beginning sampling and testing. |
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5. One of the interesting features of this project was that the different teachers found different 'homes' for the environmental education work in their curriculum - for example, general science, technology studies, computing, etc. |
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6. Older students were able to work more independently on their collection of water samples. This student is collecting invertebrate fauna for additional study. Students from the school keyed their data into an international computer conference that was housed at the University of Michigan under the coordination of Professor Bill Stapp. |
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7. The international computer conference allowed each participating school to 'talk' with any of the 100 or so other participating schools. The benefits of such interaction were that students at any school could compare their data on any parameter with those from schools in other locations. |
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8. This is similar comparative data for the parameter of total solids. Other uses that students put the computer conference to included the exchange of geographical context information, exploration of alternative methods for data collection and analysis, establishment of new networks, as well as simply making new 'electronic pen friends'
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9. On the basis of computations involving all nine water quality parameters, students were able to come up with a single overall comparative index of water quality for their particular sample sites, and to place that index in an international context.
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10. Overall, however, the proportion of total project time spent on the computer conference was disappointingly low - lower than the teachers expected. There were a number of technical problems associated with establishing and maintaining the computer link with overseas schools; and in a sense the more conventional approach of using the library rather than the computer conference as a resource remained dominant.
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11. Case Study 2 |
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12. After doing some early analysis of tap water throughout the town, the teacher and students decided to sample some of the water at its source - the town's reservoir. Here the teacher is briefing the students at the reservoir about what they are required to do. |
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13. On the day they arrived at the reservoir, a team from the local water board was also present, collecting water samples from a sampling station at the end of the pier. |
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14. The teacher and students began to walk out along the somewhat rickety pier to get to the sampling station. However, before they got much further than where they are in this photo they were ordered in a forceful and somewhat aggressive manner to remove themselves from the pier. Not wanting to be involved in a dangerous conflict, they wisely did so. |
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15. However, they were not easily deterred, and only two days later they revisited the reservoir with the intention of resuming their water sample collecting, hopefully without the intervention of the water board. However ..., the pier had been removed and burnt! |
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16. The significance of this was not lost on the students, who tended to perceive the demolition of the pier as an attempt by the apparently defensive water board to prevent ready access by the students to the sampling point. The political character of environmental education was emerging in concrete terms for these students. |
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17. The students' determination to continue their study into this increasingly suspicious situation was not reduced, and they turned to collecting water samples from the more difficult locations of the water's edge ... |
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18. The reservoir spillway. It should be pointed out that the perception that the water board had destroyed the pier in order to prevent student access to the sample point was only surmise. The water board may well have acted with the morally loftier motive of concern for safety, - the pier was, as stated earlier, quite rickety. |
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19. Once obtained, the water samples were analysed either in the field or, as shown here, in the school science laboratory. |
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20. Data arising from analysis of water quality were then keyed into the computer conference. The simple set up here was very workable: the computer was located in the teacher's preparation room adjoining the science lab, so the students could work away in a relatively quite and secure setting. |
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21. Usually within two days, a number of responses to Australian student's entries were received from America and Germany. In this way, the computer conference served as an alternative source of advice and support to the more conventional one (the classroom teacher and the library). The computer conference acted as a larger, international classroom, placing students in the isolated Australian schools in direct contact with students elsewhere in the world. Thus the computer conference acted to expand the 'student scientific community' available to students. |
Source: Robottom, I. (1987) The Dual Challenge for Professional Development in Environmental Education, in Environmental Education - Past, Present and Future. Proceedings of the Third National Environmental Education Seminar and Workshops, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, pp. 80-82.
1. Professional development in environmental education should be enquiry based.
Professional development activities in environmental education should encourage participants at all levels to adopt a research stance to their own environmental education practices. Current practices in environmental education (teaching, curriculum development, inservice activities, teacher education activities, institutional organisation ... ) should be regarded as problematic - as having the potential for improvement through participant research.
2. Professional development in environmental education should be participatory and practice-based.
Environmental education practices are shaped (guided or constrained) by the theories of practitioners themselves, and by the theories of others built into the structures and relationships of the institutions within which practitioners work. Environmental education problems are matters concerning the practices of individuals and groups: they occur when there are gaps between what practitioners think they are doing and what they are actually doing (these are problems of 'false consciousness'); and they occur when there are gaps between what they want to do and what they are actually able to do in their particular setting (these are problems of 'institutional pressure'). In either case, it is essential that the practitioner be directly involved in addressing these problems, because what is to count as a 'solution' will only become clear through a process of working through the relationship of theory and practice. Professional development courses consisting solely in prior 'training in the disciplines' conducted outside the work contexts of practitioners are of limited help in resolving these practical problems. Approaches to professional development that impose a division of labour between 'practitioners' and 'researchers' should be abandoned.
3. Professional development in environmental education should be critical.
Professional development in environmental education should entail a critique of the environmental and educational values and assumptions that inform existing environmental education policies, activities and organisational relationships. It is through processes of enlightenment about the values informing and justifying policies, activities and organisational relationships that change in these registers is made possible as practitioners come to an understanding of the field through their critical enquiries and develop their own theories about environment and education.
4. Professional development in environmental education should be community-based.
Environmental education problems are doubly idiosyncratic: the environmental issues that form the substance of environmental education work are usually specific in terms of time and space (this is simply to say that environmental conditions in different parts of the world are different); and educational problems are rarely susceptible to universal solutions (this is to say that the ecology of classrooms differs from classroom to classroom).
5. Professional development in environmental education should be collaborative.
There are two reasons for collaborative work in professional development in environmental education. Firstly, recognition of instances of false consciousness or institutional pressure often requires the assistance of colleagues working in similar circumstances (several heads are better than one). And secondly, many of the forces acting against improvement in environmental education are political in character, and collective action is usually more productive than individual efforts in the context of political struggles. (Examples of the political character of the forces shaping environmental education are: the tendency of schools (and governments) to favour a 'safe' form of environmental education like the teaching of basic ecological principles rather than the investigation of controversial local environmental issues; the tendency of textbook agents and educational consultants to favour the teaching of substantive content (information about the environment) rather than to encourage a critical, enquiry-based form of environmental education - because to do otherwise would be to threaten the relevance of their own expertise; the struggle for resources engaged in by interdisciplinary subject-based curriculum).
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