CHAPTER 24
Environmental Education
The field of environmental education and associated research activities are experiencing a period of rapid growth as we settle into the new millennium. Many reasons are claimed to explain this relatively new focus, including increasingly more pervasive and global environmental issues, changing societal expectations, and educational reform. Societies are searching for new narratives that give guidance and inspiration to people and purpose to schooling. Within these narratives, that range from teaching young people to accept the world as it is, to those that encourage critical thinking more distanced from conventional wisdom and intended to change what is wrong, is one that insists on our moral obligation to the planet. It is a narrative of extraordinary potential, says Postman (1995), because it is a story of human beings as stewards of the Earth, caretakers with a global consciousness and a sense of educational responsibility.
The purpose of this chapter is to engage the thought and practice of environmental education research in debates about “Our Common Future,” debates that are occurring in many established curriculum fields. Because research within environmental education is characterized by both unity and diversity, the field is introduced, first, in terms of the contextual complexity of social, political, and cultural influences within which research in this field is situated. Second, environmental education research is described in terms of a variety of approaches to inquiry, with the use of example cases that illustrate the breadth and depth of research activity. Third, this requisite variety is situated within recent developments and current trends of both methodological and substantive issues in environmental education research. Finally, issues of quality in this field of inquiry are characterized within the politics of research that inscribe each of the research areas of the social sciences, including science education.
Although recent literature reviews have served to both characterize and provide substantive legitimacy to environmental education research (see, for example, Andrew & Malone, 1995; Hart & Nolan, 1999; Palmer, 1998; Posch, 1993; Rickinson, 2001; Williams, 1996), this chapter challenges researchers to regard these forms of inquiry as political. This means taking seriously issues of epistemology/ontology that necessitate reconsideration about what counts as legitimate. For example, attempts to prescribe global research agendas have seldom led to change in practice because they are not well attuned to contextual needs, values, and cultures. Yet local issues often cannot be understood except in the global frame. Thus, tensions between powerful localizing and globalizing forces necessitate more comprehensive understandings of methodologies that may strain the boundaries of inquiry. Challenges for research in environmental education imply a need for broadened conceptions of research as well as innovative and sensitive responses if such meanings of research are to be understood.
Meaning in research is related to purpose. Environmental educators envision caring, responsible people who construct, for themselves, the values that underpin wise judgments and competent actions relating to their environment, whether physical or social (Smyth, 2002). This seemingly simple vision becomes complex because education involves people and organizations at many levels—international and national, governmental and nongovernmental, formal and nonformal, public and private. Together they form a cluster of systems interacting with each other and the societies to which they belong. According to Smyth (2002), although those not directly involved in environmental education may think of it as a formal subject to be taught as a distinct part of the curriculum, it might better be regarded as a competence, as a permeating quality extending from personal and social values and emerging as ways of thinking, acting, or being.
WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION?
Arguably the largest of many networks of professionals and people working worldwide to promote environmental education, the North American Association for Environmental Education (see NAAEE, n.d.) represents some of the ideals that can be traced to definitions of environmental education resulting from international agreements at significant conferences such as those held in Stockholm in 1972, Belgrade in 1975, and Tbilisi in 1977 (Palmer, 1998). Along with counterparts in many countries, NAAEE rhetoric from the current website is reminiscent of the following classic definition of environmental education drafted as a result of the international working meeting on environmental education in the school curriculum sponsored by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): “Environmental education is the process of recognizing values and clarifying concepts in order to develop skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate the inter-relatedness among man, his culture, and his biophysical surroundings. Environmental education also entails practice in decision-making and self-formulation of a code of behavior about issues concerning environmental quality” (IUCN, 1970).
However, definitions of environmental education most often referenced are from drafts of the Belgrade Charter and the Tbilisi Declaration. According to these documents, the goals of environmental education are:
These early statements continue to capture the sentiments of increasingly large educational associations globally, as evidenced by the recent rhetoric of sustainable development originating with the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, 1980), which, according to Greenall (1987), is becoming more specific and focused:
Ultimately, the behavior of entire societies towards the biosphere must be transformed if the achievement of conservation objectives is to be assured. A new ethic, embracing plants and animals as well as people, is required for human societies to live in harmony with the natural world on which they depend for survival and wellbeing. The long term task of environmental education is to foster or reinforce attitudes and behavior compatible with this new ethic. (IUCN, 1980, section 13)
The essence of this strategy was reinforced and expanded by the World Conference on Environment and Development (WCED), widely known as the Brundtland Commission Report and published as Our Common Future (WCED, 1987).
Environmental Education and Sustainable Development
The term sustainable development first gained widespread attention as a result of Brundtland in the run-up to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Huckle, 2003). The concept was endorsed by 149 countries as Agenda 21, in the global action plan for sustainable development. Chapter 36 recommended that education in each country be re-oriented to include environment and development education. This rhetoric has continued to dominate the language of recent international conferences at Thessaloniki in 1997 and Johannesburg in 2003.
Although sustainable development could take different forms in different societies, it is generally defined to mean development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is widely acknowledged that sustainable development has ecological, economic, social, cultural, and personal dimensions, as a dynamic process that enables all people to realize their potential and improve the quality of life in ways that simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life-support systems (Huckle, 2003). The term is not uncontested, however, and although environmental education continues as the commonly used term, other concepts, such as environmental literacy, ecological citizenship, or learning for sustainability, have also been proposed (see EER, 8(1); Bonnett, 2002; Elliott, 1999; Jickling, 1992; McKeown & Hopkins, 2003; Stables, 1998; Stables & Scott, 2002).
According to Huckle (2003), all such definitions of environmental education or sustainable development rest on ethical foundations that are assumed to be about balancing four sets of values—environmental protection, quality of life, intergenerational equity, and intragenerational equity. These values are subsumed in a global ethic for living sustainably as part of the Earth Charter (2000), which urges the world's people to live as global citizens with a sense of universal responsibility. Its 16 principles are based on respect and caring for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and environmental justice, and democracy through political processes. Although there is no consensus on how these ethics and values should be translated into action, a number of discourses operate to shape our thinking on environment and development issues. These discourses on environmental education need to be made visible to pupils so they can learn to critique its underpinning social values and beliefs. This kind of education for critical thinking represents a challenge to curriculum developers and teachers not unlike new visions proposed for science education (see Cobern, 1991, 2000a, 2000b; Coble & Koballa, 1996; Donnelly, 2002).
Foundations of Environmental Education
It is worth considering whether the philosophical basis for environmental education or education for sustainable development in schools has been adequately conceptualized. It is worth the effort, according to Huckle (2003), because the cultural turn associated with the rise of postmodernism means that educators must now pay greater attention to ways in which social and ecological processes construct nature and environment. For, once constructed and represented, nature, environment, and environmental issues act as resources for identity formation, and, once formed, identity determines how we understand and evaluate social and environmental issues (Payne, 2001). Research in environmental education and in the social sciences has just begun to focus on identity formation in relation to young people's experiences in early and middle childhood (see Corsaro, 1997; Hutchison, 1998; Lee, 2001; Lewis & Lindsay, 2000; Panter-Brick, 1998; Pollard, Thiessen, & Filer, 1997).
As environmental education for sustainable development continues to grow and evolve, an active research community has emerged and has raised questions about education, which, like environmental education itself, often run counter to the dominant social paradigm. Whereas environmental education was once viewed as a conglomerate of nature study, conservation, and outdoor education groups, these tributaries have somehow merged into a stream of professional practice supported by research that seeks to investigate personal intents and values, and social structures that are believed necessary to organize understandings and actions that improve the quality and sustainability of natural and social environments (Palmer, 1998). Thus, research efforts have been directed toward examining which experiences might contribute to the creation of informed, active citizens capable of playing a part in creating societies that are caring about all living things and directed against forms of social and ecological injustice. Such aims and purposes, according to Fien (1993, 2000a, 2000b), are tantamount to a change in worldview from the dominant social paradigms of twentieth century industrial societies toward a new environmental paradigm of postmodern societies.
Given that these ideas are contestable presents practitioners and researchers with a curriculum problem (see, for example, Bowers, 1991, 2001, 2002). Environmental education brings into sharp relief the notion that education is not value-free: all teaching is embedded in an ideological background (see also Cobern, 1996, 2000b). However, only when the ideology strays from the taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant social paradigm does this become problematic. Whereas a liberal orientation tacitly approves the reproduction of existing social relations, many orientations to environmentalism cannot be understood except within the ideas and values of wider paradigms of social beliefs (see Dunlap & Van Liere, 1978, 1984; Lalonde & Jackson, 2002; Milbrath, 1984, 1989). These ideas and values may challenge major beliefs about concepts of economic growth and current forms of politics.
Socially critical environmental educators argue, for example, that education should seek to promote a vision of a just and sustainable world, thus acknowledging the express political purposes of environmental education. This claim begs the curriculum/pedagogical question of whether ideological critique should be integrated into education. Although the WCED (1987) recognized that environmental education is clearly aimed at transforming the dominant social paradigm through changes in national and international systems of politics, economics, and technology, an idea that has been sustained in more recent international forums in Rio de Janeiro (1992), Thessoliniki (1997), and Johannesberg (2002), it is not at all clear that this rhetoric informs current school practices. Whether mainstream education is ready for such change represents a genuine dilemma, according to many environmental educators. The real issue is ontological that is, whether mainstream education itself can be transformed.
Goals and Directions
One way to view this dilemma from the perspective of science educators is to interpret the goals of environmental education in terms of those characteristics that coincide with Bybee and Deboer's (1994) description. The debate about goals in science education also relates to the priority and emphasis given certain goals in the historical structure of the science curriculum (Roberts, 2000; Roberts & Chastko, 1990). Although there has always been some tension between curriculum models that emphasize knowledge/skills acquisition and those that emphasize personal/social development, it was, according to Hurd (1969, 1970, 1998, 2000), social/environmental realities of the late twentieth century that resulted in a shifting of the goals toward humanism (see Donnelly, 2002). This new conceptualization of science education as a means to scientific literacy, defined more broadly to cohere with societal and technological issues, was reaffirmed by the 1980s in National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) goal statements that provided strong reaffirmation of the personal/social goal emphasis. These goals were operationalized, by the mid-1980s, as a science education research literature actively investigating science-technology-society (STS) approaches to science education, approaches that were overtly humanistic, values-oriented, and relevant to a wide range of social/environmental concerns (see also AAAS, 1993).
According to Bybee and Deboer (1994), one of the greatest forces behind the STS movement within science education was the tremendous growth in environmental awareness. A more aware public was beginning to associate environmental issues, energy conservation, and use of natural resources as well as global concerns about ozone depletion and greenhouse gases as ultimately tied to science and technology. Virtually every writer who advocated for scientific literacy within an STS context raised environmental/ecological concerns as potential subject matter for school science. However, at that time, although recognized as a separate entity within the wider field of education, environmental education remained problematic as a curriculum organizer, arguably because it forced science educators to reexamine priorities as well as older arguments about cognitive, social, and political aspects of the field. While scientific literacy has remained a central goal for science education in the 1990s and 2000s (Hurd, 1998; Roberts & Östman, 1998; Ryder, 2001), the new, large-scale curriculum projects of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (Project 2061), the NSTA, and the National Center for Improving Science Education (NCISE) attempt to balance traditional goals of learning scientific conceptual knowledge and process skills with the study of personal/social/environmental issues. Thus, environmental education remains an issue in science education precisely because the social/environmental realities described by Bybee (1997), Hurd (2000), and others since the 1970s have not gone away.
It should not be assumed that environmental educators necessarily agree on matters of purpose and form. There is a rich diversity of opinions about goals and directions, as in science education, but perhaps more demanding of educational reform (see Jickling, 2001; Stables, 2001). Because environmental education aims at the construction of environmental ethics, it is inherently focused on the personal/ social emphasis. Even so, environmental educators differ over the ideological ends served by adopting a values pluralism approach as well as on claims to the neutrality of liberal approaches to the incorporation of values within education. For example, critical environmental educators argue that a liberal orientation fails to recognize education and schooling as already embedded within a system of values that are taken-for granted, and therefore are unexamined and unquestioned (Fien, 1993). Similar cases have been advanced by teachers advocating for consideration of competing perspectives through critical discourse with regard to religious or multicultural education.
In practice, many educators have developed professional strategies that have safeguarded students from forms of indoctrination or unethical teaching practices (Harris, 1990; Huckle, 1985a; Kelly, 1986; Richardson, 1982). Huckle (1983, 2003), for example, argues for approaches that link environmental concerns to wider political agendas, thus viewing environmental education as a form of political (i.e., citizenship) education. Such an approach could provide students with understandings and skills of political literacy and democracy through active citizen participation— those critical thinking and decision-making skills that, along with attention to human intentionality, inscribe forms of environmental education that go beyond behaviorist objectives and toward what Jensen and Schnack (1994) describe as action competence.
There is nothing that should be considered subversive, coercive, or heavy-handed about teachers who adopt institutional guidelines toward student understanding of a wide range of intellectual, action, and communication skills that enable active involvement in human decision making. In respect of environmental learning, Huckle (1985b, 2003) outlines development of critical environmental consciousness, critical thinking skills, environmental ethics, and processes of political literacy (i.e., environmental citizenship) as necessary to understand how current political systems work, appreciate variety in beliefs and policies, and evaluate alternatives. It should be possible to nurture and strengthen democratic values such as freedom of choice, tolerance, fairness, and so on, through learning how to adopt a critical stance, articulate reasons for particular views, assess evidence within political opinion, engage multiple perspectives, and tolerate diversity of ideas, beliefs, interests, and values (see Aikenhead, 1996; Crick, 1978; Porter, 1981). At its most basic level, environmental education is essentially about creating the conditions for citizen participation whereby citizens are educated to take responsibility for shaping and managing their own environments (see Breiting, 1988; Brubaker, 1972; Bull et al., 1988; Fien, 1993; Greenall-Gough, 1990; Hungerford, Peyton, & Wilke, 1980; Ryder, 2002; Wals, 1990).
Whereas earlier movements in nature study, conservation and outdoor education, did not challenge the socioeconomic fabric of society, environmental education has the potential, and some would argue the intent, to do so. The environmental movement signals fundamental changes in social consciousness, as environmental education does for educational consciousness. Socially critical and political action goals of environmental education stand in stark contrast to more conservative goals of science education (see Jenkins, 1994; Millar, 1989; Millar & Osborne, 1998). Thus, it should not be surprising that by the 1980s environmental education researchers began to observe what Stevenson (1987) described as pronounced discrepancies between the contemporary philosophy of environmental education and those of traditional educational programs (see, for example, Fien, 1993; Greenall, 1981; Lowe, 1998; Robottom, 1982; Sterling, 2001; Volk, Hungerford, & Tomera, 1984). Historically, schools were not intended to develop critical thinkers or encourage active participation in social/environmental decision making. Yet the goals of environmental education continue to emphasize critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making as a basis for active involvement in the resolution of environmental problems (Davis, 2003). That these goals are not easily accommodated in the goals and organization of schools poses challenges to existing subject area curricula such as science.
Quite recently there are some indications that pressures to reform curriculum areas such as science are tending, once again, to reduce the grip on rigid adherence to one set of goals (i.e., knowledge and skills) at the expense of others (i.e., personal/ social development). Reasons have been articulated for more constructivist approaches as organizers for science curricula (e.g., Cobern, 1998b; Leach & Scott, 2002). These tendencies, though not uncontested (see Matthews, 1998, 2000; Solomon, 1994), may be more likely to align with the social constructivist inclinations among the goals of environmental education. Thus, the recognition that the relevance of one dominant conception of scientific knowledge as authoritative, objective, discipline-centered, and technical is once again being tempered by the recognition of other, equally legitimate ways of knowing (see Duschl & Osborne, 2002).
ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION RESEARCH
Recognition of multiple epistemologies within the research community of science education would seem to create some space for more constructive consideration of commonsense knowledge of everyday experience in science courses, transfer some control for learning to students, and provide openings for more in-depth studies of relevant social/environmental issues and problems (see Jenkins, 1994; Ryder, 2001, 2002). Parallel developments in research in both science and environmental education engage new methodological approaches and new research foci on, for example, the ideas, interests, and thinking of practitioners as important in school pedagogies. The following sections illustrate how environmental education research may represent challenges to traditional conceptions of (science) education research in ways that parallel those just described in pedagogical theory and practice.
Research as Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Environmental Education—Early Research
Any discussion of research in environmental education must account for perspectives on both its theory and its practice. Increasingly, researchers in environmental education have begun to acknowledge their differences as a sign of health in inter-subjective inquiry. Evolving understandings of even the most fundamental terms such as environmental education itself, as well as sustainability and sustainable development, makes inquiry far from straightforward (see, for example, Gough & Scott, 2003; Palmer, 1998; Scott & Gough, 2003; Scott & Oulton, 1992; Smyth, 2002). Problems of definition surrounding terms such as environmentalism, deep ecology, and ecocentrism that have been debated in philosophy-oriented journals such as Environmental Ethics and Trumpeter over many years remain interesting because they constitute broad ontological and epistemological frames for environmental education research.
It should not be surprising, then, when journal editors such as Gough and Scott (2003) attempt to sort through some matters of definition surrounding not only environmental education but education for sustainable development. In so doing they raise questions about educational perspectives as framed by larger goals of education in ways that enable the process of dealing with uncertainty, complexity, and risk, that is, by taking a position yet remaining open to, even encouraging, critique (see Rauch, 2002). Given the notion that problems of definition will and should remain problematic provides new perspectives on the relationships between theory and practice in both environmental education and environmental education research.
Although a rhetoric-reality gap remains an underpinning for research in environmental education (as it does for science education), linking these contested goals to the complex pedagogical tasks associated with classroom contexts represents a new challenge. Whereas attention in the early years of environmental education research was focused on establishing connections between knowledge, attitude, and behavior within traditional school practices, more recent work expands this focus methodologically and philosophically. As Reason (1988) suggests, our basic philosophical stance for new approaches to human inquiry follow from worldviews that merge systems thinking, ecological concerns, feminism, and education in ways that are critical of overreliance on reductionist applied science methods. Such a stance is characterized by research that questions how and why reality comes to be constructed in particular ways. Given that educational systems tend to sustain sets of social values that can be influenced by self-interests, these questions remain largely unscrutinized (Robottom, 1987).
It was Robottom's (1987) contention that the early research agenda in environmental education was shaped by an instrumentalist view of educational change. As a consequence, center-periphery research strategies retained characteristics of objective-based rationalist inquiry that served to reinforce, rather than reconstruct, key features of institutional education. Control over the language of the goals (e.g., through UNESCO-sponsored international forums) influenced decision making, resources, and research practices. By the late 1980s, however, forms of control over the research agenda were openly questioned and contrasted with alternative views of interpretive, participatory, community-based inquiry based on more socially critical forms of environmental education. Such challenges to dominant perspectives in environmental education research were responsible for exposing contradictions in environmental education practices (in schools) as incapable of meeting their socially critical charter. Although subsequently challenged from poststructuralist perspectives, these critiques of existing orthodoxies in environmental education research represented a turning point in how research was considered in environmental education (see Hart & Robottom, 1990; Robottom & Hart, 1993).
The 1990s—Debating Perspectives in Environmental Education Research
By the early 1990s several research symposia and conference workshops were organized to debate perspectives in environmental education research (see Mrazek, 1993). Forums such as these raised questions of epistemology and philosophy that followed wider debates in the field of education. Reviews of environmental education research prior to that time lacked the influences of a broadened consideration of methodological perspectives. For example, according to Palmer (1998), the majority of research studies in the 1970s and 1980s reflected positivist characteristics and a concern for congruence between goals and outcomes, legitimated by the use of applied science methods. Published studies, primarily in the U.S.-based Journal of Environmental Education, sought to derive cognitive and affective factors (variables) as determinants of responsible environmental behavior (see, for example, Hungerford, Peyton, & Wilke, 1980, 1983; Hungerford & Volk, 1990; Ramsey & Hungerford, 1989). Meta-analytic studies that posited up to 15 variables associated with environmental behavior resulted in the construction of models of responsible environmental behavior (see Hines, Hungerford, & Tomera, 1986/87). Despite limitations raised in critiques of positivist-based research, reviews by Palmer (1998), Williams (1996), and others recognize the contributions made by these researchers within the context of the times, and, as others have argued, as forms of inquiry that continue to inform our understandings in environmental education research (see Connell, 1997; Oulton & Scott, 2000; Palmer, 1998; Walker, 1997).
Science education is not immune to these debates about research philosophy and methodology, given its educational roots in the social sciences. According to Fien and Hillcoat (1996), the paradigm upon which research methodology is based is often neglected when one paradigm is so dominant that it is viewed as independent of ideology. However, arguments for a meta-research agenda in science education are reflective of growing interpretive and critical movements in education that frame research based on alternative epistemologies and worldviews (see Robottom & Hart, 1993). The importance of these debates is not in the distinctiveness of research methods (i.e., the tools in the researcher's toolkit), but in the assumptions that prefigure what is to count as legitimate ways of knowing and of knowledge (i.e., epistemological distinctiveness) as well as legitimate ways of finding out (i.e., methodologies and methods). Trends toward more humanistic approaches are evident in recent forms of environmental education research (Williams, 1996) and science education research (Donnelly, 2002). The significance of this epistemological shift is that educational researchers are now obliged to ground their work philosophically within several research perspectives and methodologically beyond only technical efficiencies of method.
Educational researchers now have considerably more scope in framing research questions. Perspectives ranging from feminist (including ecofeminist), gendered, race-based, and cultural studies overlie philosophically distinctive interpretive, critical, and poststructural approaches in ways that are often “blurred” (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). That this diversity is manifested in environmental education research is reflected in recent reviews of research (Hart & Nolan, 1999; Rickinson, 2001), in articles in an expanding array of journals that report environmental education research in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and southern Africa, for example, as well as in special editions of science education [e.g., International Journal of Science Education (IJSE) 15(5), Studies in Science Education (SSE) 25] and education journals [e.g., Cambridge Journal of Education (CJE) 29(3), Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) 34(5), Prospects xxx(1), and Educational Philosophy and Theory 33(2)].
Expansion of research perspectives in environmental education has been accompanied by an elaboration of different views of knowledge within social science and educational research. While environmental education has been concerned about investigating empirical questions posed by environmental problems within educational settings, its distinctive concern, according to Robottom (2000), is with political, sociocultural, and ethical implications of environmental change. Unlike most science education (see, for example, Millar, Leach, & Osborne, 2000; Solomon & Thomas, 1999), environmental education sees the role of education as a post-empiricist concern with social and philosophical forms of inquiry. Knowledge is generated not only by scientific inquiry, but also by addressing philosophical issues about people's intentions and predispositions as subjective, interpretive constructions of the democratic process. Accordingly, professional dilemmas associated with the philosophical and contextual nature of environmental issues remain significant for teachers (Robottom, 2000).
Palmer's (1998) review is useful in consolidating political aspects of these shifts in thinking about what counts as environmental education research. For example, juxtaposing Robertson's (1994) examination of constructivism in science education with interpretivist forms of environmental education research illustrates how representation, implicated in both forms of inquiry, builds on earlier work by Driver and Oldham (1986) in eliciting students’ personal conceptualizing and understandings of scientific principles and natural phenomena (see also Driver, Leach, Millar, & Scott, 1996). Given her own work in eliciting and interpreting children's emergent environmentalism, Palmer acknowledges a need for incorporation of growing bodies of research in ethnography, phenomenology, and narrative forms of inquiry in environmental education research.
Examination of critical perspectives in such projects as Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI) (Elliott, 1995; Posch, 1988, 1990, 1996) and in Fien and Hillcoat (1996) generates additional issues. For example, Posch (1996) and Elliott (1995) describe ENSI as action research involving a theory of learning related to active engagement in relevant, real-life problems. As such, the approach has struggled to overcome existing curriculum and school structures. Evaluative criteria, drawn from socially critical theory, are quite formidable, particularly those involving children in social action and social critique (see Walker, 1996). Thus, despite widespread success of the ENSI Project, particularly in European countries, practical pedagogical application, involved in the process of uncovering and making explicit the values and interests of individuals and groups who adopt certain positions with respect to social/environmental issues as a means to individual emancipation or social transformation, has proved challenging.
Ideas underpinning critical education for the environment (in contrast to education about, or in, or through environment), built up through the 1980s, have exerted extensive influence in environmental education research, particularly outside the United States. Although critical theory has been useful in overcoming limitations of positivist and interpretivist inquiry, Oulton and Scott (2000) see contradictions in the so-called politics for emancipation. If such a position involves proffering specific and specified values, then critical theory is simply the means to yet another orthodoxy. However, if viewed as a means of self-reflection and social scrutiny without particular ends, then environmental education researchers may in fact be engaged in methodological debates that are more characteristic of poststructuralist than critical forms of educational inquiry, involving more sophisticated philosophical arguments about social constructions of social science research. Obviously, no one research perspective is appropriate to environmental or science education research, and debates about intersubjectivity are as necessary among one group of researchers as another. The point, according to Oulton and Scott (2000), is to look beyond various interests if we are genuinely interested in finding ways—multiple and contextual ways—of resolving problems faced by teachers and schools in implementing environmental education. Such strategies are necessarily multiparadigmatic, reflexive, and iterative.
Recent Research in Environmental Education—Diversity and Critique
Whereas environmental education was virtually unknown until the late 1960s, the last 30 years, according to Rickinson (2001, 2003), have seen growing recognition that environmental challenges have important implications for education. Virtually unknown and frequently misinterpreted in earlier years, environmental education research has gained recognition globally, forming the basis of national frameworks and international policy agreements (Fensham, 1978; Tilbury & Walford, 1996). The research community that drives this activity has expanded so rapidly since Posch's (1993) review of research that it almost defies review, if indeed reviews can be viewed as appropriate forms of reporting the literature (see EER, 9(2); Hart, 2003a). This expansion has been complicated by the increasing variety in forms of inquiry that are now viewed as legitimate within the social sciences.
Although the case for diverse forms of inquiry, capable of responding to complex questions of human intention and social relations, has been taken up by environmental education researchers, the nature of this endeavor is difficult to describe. At this point, it seems that research in environmental education can be characterized by requisite variety, but also by debate about the relative adequacy of several genres of inquiry. Thus, current research in environmental education reflects the need to develop a more reflexive posture toward meta-theorizing in environmental education so that respective methodological assumptions and political theories can be rendered more transparent and open to appraisal (O'Donoghue & McNaught, 1991; Robottom & Hart, 1993).
Rickinson's (2001) portrayal of research on environmental learning illustrates how important methodological critique becomes, given a rapidly expanding evidence base within a methodologically diverse field of inquiry. His findings reveal the need for more sophisticated conversations about the nature and direction of such inquiries as well as the integrity of different theoretical perspectives and methodological applications. Reminiscent of reviews of research that once filled entire volumes of Science Education, Rickinson's (2001) review serves to integrate multiple perspectives as a representation of research foci and methodological variety in ways that challenge existing conceptions of learning in complex environments (see Barron, 1995; Bonnett & Williams, 1998: Keliher, 1997; Payne, 1998a, 1998b; Wals, 1994a, 1994b).
First, the Rickinson (2001) review provides evidence that recent studies are likely to be qualitative, often with interests in poststructural forms of interpretive or critical understanding. Claims tend not to be expressed as generalizations but as situational, descriptive, and tentative, reflecting postmodernist sensibilities (see Ballantyne, Connell, & Fien, 1998a, 1998b; Jensen, Kofoed, Uhrenholdt, & Vognsen, 1995). Second, a strong science education influence persists, related particularly to studies of science-based knowledge in environmental issues (see Simmons, 1998) and to studies of environmental education found within science-based school programs (see Bogner, 1998). Common to these types of studies is evidence of inadequacies and misconceptions in students’ understanding of environmental issues across many countries (Gambro & Switzky, 1999). This evidence is reflected in the disciplinary background not only of science teachers who primarily engage in this activity, particularly in middle and secondary schools, but of environmental education researchers themselves. However, there is also evidence that this trend may be weakening, given new methodological foci on the nature of students learning experiences and student perceptions rather than on learning outcomes.
Third, a rapid expansion of the geographical base of environmental education research is evident in Rickinson's (2001) review. Although environmental education research has tended to concentrate in North America, Europe/UK, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, the recent First World Environmental Education Congress (FWEEC) (Azeiteiro et al., 2003) testifies to concentrations of activity in many other countries and regions such as Brazil and Central America. It is interesting that marked variations in methodological approach appear to be somewhat regional and that the dominance of quantitative approaches in certain areas has limited the range and scope of these inquiries in this area of learning (Rickinson, 2001). Other reviews of environmental education research reflect increasing concern about the appropriateness of methodology in areas such as environmental knowledge, attitude, and behavior (see Zelezny, 1999); learning outcomes (Leeming, Dwyer, Porter, & Cobern, 1993); outdoor experiences (Keighley, 1997); environmental sensitivity (Chawla, 1998); and student understanding of global environmental issues (Boyes & Stanisstreet, 1996). This concern with methodology is also reflected in more comprehensive and in periodic reviews of the research literature in environmental education (see Andrew & Malone, 1995; Iozzi, 1981, 1989; Marcinkowski & Mrazek, 1996; Wagner, 1997).
Although review studies of particular areas of environmental education research have provided indications of, for example, students’ weak knowledge or misconceptions of environmental issues, these results are often contested, as they have been in science education (see Brody, 1996; Clark, 1996; Ivy, Lee, & Chuan, 1998; Koulaidis & Christidou, 1999; Wylie, Sheehy, McGuinnes, & Orchard, 1998). Methodologically, the concern is that most of these studies were short-term and did not seek to investigate why respondents viewed environmental issues in particular ways. The weakness of this evidence was magnified when the knowledge-attitude relationship was extended to attempts to quantitatively connect knowledge and attitude with behavior (Chan, 1996; Connell et al., 1998). Evidence based on questionnaire or self-reported data varied so greatly that it remains difficult to suggest that this line of inquiry can help us understand what motivates young people to participate in proenvironmental behavior or how this is connected to cognition or affect (see, e.g., Leal Filho, 1996; Kahn & Friedman, 1995; Prelle & Solomon, 1996).
Questions about the quality of evidence from large numbers of these studies, as well as several methodological critiques, remain (see Hungerford, 1996; Smith-Sebasto, 1998a). Despite claims of positive learning outcomes and, in a few cases, behavioral change (see Bogner, 1998; Emmons, 1997; Leeming, Porter, Dwyer, Cobern, & Oliver, 1997; Uzzell et al., 1995), a number of researchers have begun to focus on questions about the nature of student thinking, using metaphors and more robust models of student understanding (see Boyes & Stanisstreet, 1997; Boyes, Stanisstreet, & Papantiniou, 1999). Increasingly researchers are exploring how and why certain processes such as role-modeling and collaborative, community, or direct outdoors experiences bring about positive learning outcomes (Rickinson, 2001, 2003).
Reviews of this literature also provide evidence that researchers can vary their research strategies, given a much wider array of legitimate methodologies (see Hart & Nolan, 1999). For example, in recent studies of students’ ideas and perceptions of nature, evidence of learning is often more descriptive, reflecting phenomenological or narrative inquiries as opposed to explanations (see Barron, 1995; Bonnett & Williams, 1998; Keliher, 1997; Palmer & Suggate, 1996; Payne, 1998a, 1998b; Wals, 1994a, 1994b). Although it remains unclear whether these investigations will provide meaningful directions for teachers, researchers were encouraged by the complexity and richness of data about young people's views of nature. These research findings appear to correspond to research with teachers who trace environmental sensitivities and sensibilities to significant life experiences, often from middle childhood, with important adult mentors (see Chawla, 1994, 1998; Kaufman, Ewing, Hyle, Montgomery, & Self, 2001; Palmer, Suggate, Bajd, et al., 1998; Palmer, Suggate, Robottom, & Hart, 1999). Although somewhat speculative, such studies into the nature of these conceptions and about how young people socially construct their ideas and images of nature and of environment appear to warrant further investigation.
Given recent trends in education toward more interpretive forms of inquiry, Hart and Nolan's (1999) review of environmental education research illustrates how epistemological/ontological broadening has, on the one hand, opened inquiry methodologically and raised questions of representation, legitimacy, and quality on the other. Inquiry in environmental education is now a complex, multiparadigmatic array of methodological thought and practice. New forms of research are emerging as researchers’ identities are altered to include participatory action as well as perspectives of women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and differently abled people of many kinds. These theoretical perspectives form part of the responsibility of new research texts that together with emergent critical and poststructural theory are changing the face of inquiry in education. As Crotty (1998) suggests, the idea of inquiry is not in adopting an existing paradigm, but in articulating the epistemological and theoretical perspectives that have influenced, rather than determined, their work. New languages are needed so that we can engage more sophisticated discussions about the meanings and purposes of our work, embedded as it is, within a politics of method.
Looking beyond correspondence in knowledge-attitude-behavior relationships involves a complex of perceptions that implicates people's reasons and feelings, reciprocally and dialectically, with their actions. A number of studies in environmental education research are beginning to conceptualize human “actions” as more complex subjective explorations of thought, meaning, and understanding attached to certain ways of being in the world (i.e., ontologies) (see Hicks, 1993; Payne, 1999). These arguments have been extended to include issues of gender, class, race, and cultural identities and relations (see Lousley, 1999).
Smith-Sebasto (1998) contrasts these perspectives with research in science education, where demands are for more rigor in the application of existing behavioral measurements rather than a questioning of the goals of such endeavors themselves. Whatever the reasons, environmental education researchers have concerns that we may have persisted in asking the wrong questions, or questions that do not warrant answers (Scott, 2003). Journal editors and publishers are now obliged to address the politics of publications characterized by methodological diversity, evaluative criteria appropriate to genre as a means of maintaining quality, and justification not only of methods but of philosophical perspective. Suffice it to say that environmental education journals have diverged from their science education prototypes.
Soltis (1984) has argued that a useful way of viewing tensions within a research community is to place them within the broader context of philosophical perspectives. That is to say, different approaches to research are always underpinned by different assumptions about what counts as knowledge or as reality (May, 2001). In Eisner's (1990) terms, there is more than one way to partition reality. Mixing methods is now a matter of methodology that requires addressing issues at theoretical conceptual levels. Whereas object-based inquiries attempt to overcome uncertainty through detachment and analytic procedure, subject-based research seeks to transcend the subject/object binary by acknowledging narratives of primary subjective experience as legitimate knowledge within certain boundaries of credibility and authenticity. Journals such as EER have been active in raising meta-theoretical and meta-methodological issues of open engagement and debate. Special editions have examined issues related to research on significant life experiences [EER 4(4), 5(4)], qualitative methods [6(1)], language of sustainability [7(2) and 8(1)], reviews of research [9(1)], and case study research (forthcoming). Special issues of the CJEE have focused on issues of research involved in narrative approaches [7(2)] and cultural awareness [7(1)]. Educational journals such as Educational Philosophy and Theory (see Stables & Scott, 2001), the CJE (see Bonnett & Elliott, 1999), and IJSE have addressed environmental education for various reasons, including its relevance to educational thought and practice, the adequacy of current approaches, and its significance for education as a whole.
Inquiry in environmental education is finding a place within educational research because researchers are using methods that address questions and issues that the positivist paradigm failed to address. Narrative forms of inquiry (Bruner, 1990, 1996; Polkinghorne, 1995) and analysis (Cortazzi, 1993) grounded in epistemological arguments about the value of storied forms of understanding teachers’ philosophies are now forming a niche within environmental education research (see CJEE 7(2); Chenhansa & Schleppegrell, 1998; Gibson, 1996; Monroe & DeYoung, 1996; Wirth, 1996). Williams's (1996) review of the role of research in geographical and environmental education includes chapters on interpretive approaches (Gerber, 1996), critical research (Fien & Hillcoat, 1996), grounded theory (Tilbury & Walford, 1996), discourse analysis (Bennett, 1996), and case study research (Roberts, 1996).
Beyond these reviews, a number of exemplary dissertations have established precedents for new approaches to inquiry. For example, Malone (1996) described her study as critical ethnography, Mahony (1994) as ethnography, Brody (1996) as phenomenology, and Rentel (1997) as hermeneutic phenomenology. Various forms of participatory (action) research provide cases of active engagement of participants, intellectually and practically, in critical inquiries within their own contexts (e.g., Andrew, 1997; Elliott, 1991; Kyburz-Graber, Rigendinger, Hirsch, & Werner, 1997; O'Donoghue & McNaught, 1991; Papadimitriou, 1995; Posch, 1994; Robottom, 1987; Wals & Alblas, 1997). As is the case with all forms of qualitative inquiry, these approaches are subject to critique. Thus, researchers have the added task of addressing demands of critical reflexivity and intersubjective scrutiny (see Davis, 2003; N. Gough, 1999; Payne, 1999).
Case study has also been used extensively across various genres of research to represent environmental education activity (see Emmons, 1997; Gayford, 1995; O'Connor, 1997; Page, 1997). Wals and Alblas (1997) describe a case study of curriculum reform through an action research process, where teachers openly reflected on their struggles to incorporate an environmental dimension into their practices (see also Payne & Riddell, 1999). Andrew's (1997) historical case study research exemplifies Robottom's (1987) concern that community-based case-study research, as inclusive of the enactment and consequence of economic rationality as well as context, does not define the research approach that is generated through both the researchers’ assumptions and the case experience itself. In other words, the case merely determines the form of a particular study, which is why it can exist within a number of contemporary research forms and discourses, including feminist, critical, and poststructural methodology.
Although many case studies of environmental education programs tend to use participatory research (e.g., Turner, 1998; Walker, 1996), action research (e.g., Schreuder, 1994), critical action research (e.g., Fien & Rawling, 1996), or community-based action research (e.g., Pace, 1997; Peel, Robottom & Walker, 1997), many others remain as basic descriptive evaluations of environmental education programs that struggle for methodologies that can identify crucial dimensions (i.e., factors) in the development of community-based programs. These positivist tendencies, while understandable, remain a concern among interpretive and critical researchers who are more interested in the uniqueness of individual context-sensitive cases. How we “make sense” of these large numbers of descriptive “reports” that address curriculum issues ranging from integrating environmental education into formal school subjects (e.g., Randall, 1997; Shin, 1997) or art and literature (e.g., Soetaert, Top, & Eeckhout, 1996), drama (e.g., Cabral, 1998), or special education (e.g., Lock, 1998) across many regions and countries (e.g., Adedayo & Olawepo, 1997; Lee, 1997) remains to be determined.
The environmental education research literature also contains examples of out-of-school integrated programs that involve outdoor education (e.g., Nelson, 1996; Richardson & Simmons, 1996; Yerkes & Haras, 1997), experiential education (e.g., Luckman, 1996), or global education (e.g., Selby, 1999). Within these programs, students have explored ecological concepts and environmental issues by using a wide variety of curriculum areas and nonformal approaches, including agriculture (e.g., Miller, 1997), ecotourism (e.g., Cork, 1996), botanical gardens (e.g., Spencer, 1995), parks (e.g., Darlington & Black, 1996), or nature centers (e.g., Wilson, 1993a, 1993b) or by using special topics as foci for these experiences, such as water issues (e.g., Goodwin & Adkins, 1997; Ho, 1997) or endangered species (e.g., Martinez Rivera, 1997).
As the field of environmental education has matured, research has assumed a role in the reporting of large-scale status studies intended to provide more comprehensive “measures” of, for example, science learning achievements, program evaluations, and teacher education. Many of these reports use multiple methods to evaluate formal and informal programs such as Project WILD or Project Learning Tree (e.g., Collins & Romjue, 1995) or the Great Lakes Program (e.g., Nevala, 1997). Studies of specialized programs in many countries have contributed to a more globalized portrait of the nature of environmental education worldwide [e.g., Scotland (Smyth, 1999), Guyana (Leal Filho & Bynoe, 1995), Korea (Sang-Joon, 1995), Germany (Bolscho, 1990), England and Wales (Reid & Scott, 1998); Uganda (Mucunguzi, 1995); the South Pacific (Taylor & Topalian, 1995), New Zealand (Springett, 1992), and southern/eastern Africa (Taylor, 1998)]. These reports and those in the newsletter Connect (UNESCO-UNEP) reveal many variations and stages of development in environmental education programs related to local issues. They are valuable in encouraging researchers to consider their research in terms of “western” goals, ideals, and evaluative criteria as part of a “politics of transfer” issue in cultural terms. Justification of programs has often resulted in positivist evaluation models that may be inappropriate in different cultures and contexts (see Courtenay-Hall & Lott, 1999; Fien et al., 2001; Sauvé, 1999).
Research in environmental education is also characterized by inquiries focused on personal and social issues related to environmental education programs and experiences. For example, studies centered around teacher thinking include studies of teacher beliefs aboout and/or perceptions of nature, environment, or social/environmental issues (e.g., Ajiboye, Audu, & Mansaray, 1998; Bachiorri, 1995; Kasper, 1998; Nando Rosales, 1995). Increasingly, it seems, these studies go beyond quantitative comparisons among measured variables using fixed instruments in search of connections related to teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and predispositions/assumptions that may result from life history (e.g., Stocker, 1996), early life experiences (Hart, 2003b; Todt, 1995), sense of place (e.g., Chawla, 1994; Hug, 1998; Stephens, 1998), autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway, 1990), and children's concern for the environment (Chawla & Hart, 1995; P. Hart, 1999; R. Hart, 1997). Motivation for provision of environmental education is also the interest in explorations of significant life experiences (SLE) (e.g., Corcoran, 1999; Elliott, 2002; Palmer, 1998; Palmer & Suggate, 1996; Tanner, 1998a, 1998b; Wilson, 1996). As an instance of memory work, this inquiry has generated some useful critical commentary [see EER 5(1)] that has informed subsequent discussions such as AERA's research interest group in environmental education and environmental education research.
As an example of focused critical discourse, the SLE debate has raised important methodological issues that affect all areas of post-positivist inquiry (see N. Gough, 1999; Payne, 1999). This research debate has led to suggestions for explorations, for example, that seek to explain how the structuring and continuity of embodied experience (or inner nature) are immersed and embedded in the historical, social, and ecological environment (or external nature) and, thus, how individuals actively construct experiences, and their significance, in the face of equally problematic social constructions of the environment and nature (Payne, 1999b). This active debate has also led to methodological developments, including the use of certain post-structural understandings of human subjectivity and agency in environmental education research (see A. Gough, 1999). In turn, this debate reiterates the epistemological distinction, in research in the social sciences and education, between inquiry as a neutral technical process and inquiry as engagement in the social construction of knowledge. As well, it considers the ontological distinction whereby a mode of inquiry is incumbent upon the assumptions and practices not only of the research paradigm but the worldview, in this case the ecophilosophical worldview of environmental education (Robottom & Hart, 1993).
Environmental education research has also focused on children's ideas, perceptions, or perspectives, with particular emphasis on the role of nature (e.g., Keliher, 1997; Payne, 1999), early experience (e.g., Hart, 2000; Wilson, 1995, 1996, 2000), story, sense of place (Chawla, 1998; Sobel, 1997), and curriculum/school experiences (e.g., Eagles & Demare, 1999; St. Maurice, 1996) in informing children's emerging ecological and social ontology (see R. Hart, 1997; Palmer, 1995; Peters & Wilson, 1996). Numerous studies have sought to understand children's perspectives and ideas about environment and a variety of environmental issues (e.g., Boyes & Stanis-street, 1997; Hillcoat, 1995; Williams & Bonnett, 1998). Specific issues such as air pollution (Wylie et al., 1998), the greenhouse effect (Fisher, 1998; Mason & Santi, 1998), the ozone layer (Christidou, Kouladis, & Christidis, 1997), municipal waste (Glazer, Vrtacnik, & Bacnik, 1998), endangered species (Ashworth, 1995), and radon gas (Thrall, 1996) appear to be widespread, internationally, depending on local/ regional circumstances.
Research focused more specifically on student thinking as a result of course-based experiences (e.g., Mangas, Martinez & Pedauye, 1997; Tyler-Wood, Cass, & Potter, 1997), as well as experiential courses/programs (e.g., James, 1997; Leeming, 1997), has resulted in questionable findings (see Cobiac, 1995; Kuo, 1994). Thus researchers have begun to look more holistically at students’ values and beliefs (e.g., Ballantyne & Clacherty, 1990; Greaves, Stanisstreet, Boyes, & Williams, 1993; Wals, 1992). Jurin (1995) and Fason (1996) report disparities between quantitative and qualitative findings in mixed-method studies, speculating, with Boyes & Stanis-street (1998), that mixed-belief structures may exist simultaneously and that such disparities in student thinking of this complexity cannot be addressed adequately through short-term, one-shot measures.
This research literature on students thinking illustrates a concern to probe for deeper understanding about how we come to know and think about social/environmental issues in ways that reflect more sentivitity to gender (e.g., Barron, 1995; Mansaray & Ajiboye, 1997; Yeung, 1998) and culture (e.g., Chan, 1998; McIlveene, 1996). Payne (1997, 1998a) argues that it is these forms of inquiry, involving contexts and life experiences research, that are essential to understanding children's minds, ontologically, as being “in” environment, as opposed to belief structures attached to particular personality factors or environmental issues.
WHY SCIENCE EDUCATION RESEARCHERS SHOULD ATTEND TO RESEARCH ISSUES IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
So, what is distinctive about inquiry in environmental education? Why should science educators be interested in what environmental education research is saying or in how it is engaged critically and reflexively? Perhaps it is a function of the age of a discipline or of its place in society, or its natural association with dominant forms of inquiry that led to N. Gough's (1999) comment about research in science education that makes little acknowledgment of the limits to scientific explanations within the complexity of decision-making in real-world events such as environmental issues resolution. “Environmental educators,” he says, “do not have the science educator's mandate (or excuse) for privileging ‘scientific’ knowledge and methods. Thus, environmental education researchers need to recognize the contested nature of epistemology … and problematize the cultural construction of scientific knowledge” (p. 39). The point is that, within environmental education research, as in educational research generally, considerable space is now devoted not only to issues of methodology, but to issues of epistemology and ontology. Thus, where research in science education hastened to focus on method and to relegate these arguments to the philosophy of science, environmental education research has raised theoretical issues that necessitate serious philosophical consideration by researchers themselves (see Osborne, 2002; Warwick & Stephenson, 2002).
According to Robottom (2000), recent developments at levels of policy, practice, and organization raise new issues for environmental education and render past characterizations of the field as problematic. For example, the policy perspective provided by UNCED's Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992) has asserted a distinct social change agenda for environmental education that challenges the field's historical disciplinary relationships. If Agenda 21 is taken seriously, then education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving society's capacity to address social/environmental issues. Robottom (2000) views this emphasis as the basis of arguments for forms of education that address fundamental questions of ethics and values, and encourages public participation in citizen decisions about social/ environmental issues as well as cooperation in redressing existing economic, social, racial, and gender inequities. These issues involve philosophical questions (of the “ought” and “should be” kind) that are not exclusively scientific and can only be resolved through considerations of intergenerational equity, health, peace, human rights, ethnicity, gender, age, and class matters concerning democratic process, social justice, and quality of life (Robottom, 2000).
Implied in the consideration of philosophical dimensions to forms of environmental (and science) education, with an interest in individual and collective issues of ecologically sustainable development, are challenges to existing research practices. These challenges foreshadow deeper ontological/epistemological concerns that have been neglected within mainstream education (see R. Hart, 1997; Rivkin, 1995, 1997; Smith, 1998). They require active engagement of methodological considerations about forms of inquiry available to educational researchers (see Ahlberg & Leal Filho, 1998; Greenall-Gough, 1994; Groves, Jane, Robottom, & Tytler, 1998; Huckle & Sterling, 1996; Jensen, Schnack, & Simovska, 2000; Jickling, 1993; Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002; Mrazek, 1993; Oulton & Scott, 2000; Palmer, 1998; Robertson, 1994; Williams, 1996; and recent issues of EER and CJEE). Although environmental education researchers have begun to address these challenges at various conference forums of NAAEE and special research seminars, fundamental issues remain unresolved. What seems to be evolving is a critical sociology of environmental education research that continues to problematize the assumptions, values, theories, and practices upon which research activities in this field are grounded. Continuing such engagements will immerse the field in critical and poststructural conversations that appear to be necessary for its survival.
What is interesting about this notion of functioning within multiple perspectives, beyond the essentially contested nature of key conceptualizations of environmental education or philosophical debates about ideas that drive theory and practice, is the rich ground they provide for researchers who can base inquiry in several perspectives and can construct positions on their own grounds (including practical experiences, say, as a teacher). Cases have been established, for example, for forms of environmental literacy (e.g., Disinger & Roth, 2003; Stables, 1998; Stables & Bishop, 2001; Stables & Scott, 1999), education for sustainability (e.g., Huckle & Sterling, 1996), sustainable development (Gough & Scott, 2003), sustainable futures (Turner & Tilbury, 1997), or learning and sustainability (Government of Canada, 2002) where each is contested (e.g., Jickling, 1992; Oulton & Scott, 1998; Plant, 1995). Cases have also been made for particular dimensions of research, including historical (e.g., Andrew, 1998; Marsden, 1998; Morgan, 1998) and constructivist (e.g., Hoffman, 1994; Robertson, 1994b) approaches and action competence (e.g., Breiting & Nielsen, 1996; Jensen & Schnack, 1997; Schnack, 2000). Centers for environmental education research activity and debate of such issues operate in several countries, including Denmark (Royal Danish University), England (University of Bath), Australia (Deakin University and Griffith University), and the United States (University of Michigan, Southern Illinois University, the Ohio State University). Researchers are also active in many other places in areas such as nonformal education (e.g., Heimlich, 1993), technology (e.g., Dillon, 1997), adult education (e.g., Clover, Follen, & Hall, 1998), cross-cultural education (e.g., Armstrong, 1997; Chou & Roth, 1995; Corcoran & Fien, 1996; Kyburz-Graber, et al., 1997), and teacher education (Scott & Oulton, 1995).
Although just a decade ago Posch (1993) identified an absence of viable alternative visions as one of the key obstacles to effective environmental education research, the opposite may be true today. Environmental education researchers have turned their attention from a “search for solutions” to a “search for causes” and have begun to search for answers beyond positivist approaches in order to address issues of value assumptions, social visioning, and mosaics of personal and social qualities, that is, toward a broadened view of learning as action-oriented. Yet concerns remain about educational systems not attuned to the social complexities and environmental uncertainties that threaten established decision-making processes. Thus, environmental education researchers continue to raise questions about education, learning, and how to prepare students to cope with insecurity, decision making with incomplete data, and the contradictory demands of a plurality of values, or how to become citizens who participate in their various forms of government. It seems that environmental education is at a crucial point between destabilization, as prerequisite for incorporation of new elements, and stability, as a condition necessitating vigilance and skepticism. While these tensions create new opportunities for research, there are political aspects to change in subject-based curricula that make problematic the stability of systematic knowledge transmission and involve themselves in school-based initiatives full of uncertainty and risk.
The Politics of Environmental Education Research
Although recognition of the political nature of environmental education research has allowed researchers and practitioners to reconstruct relationships and to reconsider some assumed binaries such as objectivity/subjectivity and expert/novice in a new light, these new modes of knowledge generation are always subject to challenge, as they should be. Developments in the theory and practice of education can be shown to underlie these challenges as part of a politics of inquiry. The context for such challenges becomes more acute when certain forms of inquiry are marginalized because they do not conform to traditions. Viewed as a series of sociocultural processes, however, environmental education research has contested many taken-for-granted assumptions about theory and about practice in educational research.
At the level of theory, a key research issue is how we come to value alternative ways of generating knowledge. Whereas researchers in the natural sciences use objective means to justify their research, knowledge in the social sciences is less clearly defined and is subject to problems of interpretation and representation. Addressing aspects of human behavior such as intents, motives, and values involves levels of indeterminacy that traditional researchers find difficult to comprehend, often leading to misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and unfair accusations. Because education as a human endeavor resists efforts by researchers to establish causal claims that are verifiable, definitive, and cumulative, researchers are left to try to understand sociopolitical processes that reflect sociocultural purposes embedded with contradictions, as well as conflicting criteria for appraisal of success (Larabee, 1997a, 1997b).
As Rickinson (2001) argues, impacts of teaching and curriculum on learning rely on human dimensions that shape outcomes in indeterminate ways that are irreducibly normative. Knowledge generated in one context may or may not apply to another, and even particular contextualized applications depend on perspectives of practitioners and researchers. Thus, constructed knowledge is not bound by foundational constraints. So, while methodological diversity is now valued, this position carries different responsibilities for ensuring quality and accountability. Hence, the new politics of educational research is organized around new debates characterized by attempts to justify methodologies rather than methods. For example, debates within interpretivism are no longer argued as a response to positivist critique (i.e., as paradigm wars), but as differing underlying philosophies about what counts as knowledge and about how reality is perceived.
Environmental education research is characterized by increasingly active debates about the form and content of its inquiry. Questions have been raised, for example, about the legitimacy of various forms of inquiry, thus implicating the politics of methodology. Methodological approaches such as ethnography, phenomenology, and various participatory and poststructuralist perspectives are based on assumptions reflected in the languages and conceptual meanings of various philosophical discourses such as interpretivism, criticalism, and postmodernism (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). Unlike the past, when the dominance of positivism relegated such debates to the philosophy of science, questions of subjectivist epistemology and social constructivist ontology now challenge environmental education researchers to justify their narrative-based accounts of research in terms of what counts as legitimate knowledge or as adequate forms of representation in terms of what makes them seem credible, trustworthy, and authentic beyond subjective judgment. Several issues of EER and CJEE have attempted to raise such issues as we learn to negotiate our interpretations based on shared, intersubjective understandings among the community of interested researchers and practitioners. These discussions are recognized as political when inscribing legitimacy involves authority of a dominant discourse or perceived hierarchy of legitimacy. Those who do not conform may feel alienated or coerced into playing by certain rules. New methodologies that threaten existing orthodoxies may cause resistances and tacit or explicit sanctions from journal editors or granting councils. More deeply, however, the politics of methodology implicates language, sources of evidence, methods, and, ultimately, the ways in which we construct our thinking about research methodology.
At the methodological level, resistances or reactions to fields of inquiry outside our own may result in misinterpretation and misrepresentation of alternative positions whose justification depends on unfamiliar criteria. Statements that appear clear and coherent within one research genre may not be intelligible within another. The problem, according to Lather (1996), is in the assumption that it is acceptable for educational researchers to critique methodology without having studied the underlying philosophy. Thus, pleas for intelligence in debate about methodology can now be found in those special editions of EER that focus on helping researchers to rethink their methods within their methodologies without simplifying the complexities of research in practice. The idea is not to defuse debate so much as to engage the space over words as unstable as our clearly bounded territory, divided perhaps by theories and discourses, but centered by struggles to ground our work both theoretically and practically.
As a representational practice, environmental education research is always embedded in methodological commitments that are necessarily political. Researchers speak through particular discourses that understand and close the world in particular ways. Given this embeddedness within theory and the micropolitics of research practice, there are no best practices or superordinate methodologies. Thus, researchers are responsible for becoming more conscious of this politics of methodology as a means of addressing the values and beliefs that underpin our understandings and provide reasons for our research decisions. The methodology question then becomes one of how to account for our subjectivities as researchers and participants. According to N. Gough (1999), if we are to escape the automatic imprint of our own experience, we need to surpass our personal histories through acts of critical reflection, that is, to make more explicit that underlying frame of ideas, assumptions, and beliefs that guide our practices. Once articulated, and subject to critique, we may become more conscious of our values, motives, biases, and unexamined, taken-for-granted assumptions—those personal and social dimensions through which our research practices become intelligible.
Environmental education research in this sense can only be understood as an activity of interpretation where representation is always reflexively problematic. Because reality is constructed through representation, and thus is fictional, reflexivity becomes an issue of problematizing methodology by surfacing preconceptions, finding out how meanings were constructed, and how understanding is bound up in language and writing. In other words, research accounts can no longer function unproblematically as “true” representations, and grounding for accounts of research must be approached through political judgment about whether the interpretation is adequate (in contrast to reliance on foundational criteria). However, reflexivity by itself, as an issue of overcoming blind spots through a kind of self-consciousness, may be far from a neutral process. If constituted as an ability to mobilize across gender, race, and culture, critics can apply this capacity unevenly in inscribing new reflexive hierarchies of speaking positions hidden by claims that critical reviews are progressive within the politics of methodology. The irony is that critical responses to particular lines of inquiry may consciously or unconsciously privilege certain lines of inquiry through critique of others, thus engendering forms of exclusivity in the very act of denying it.
In environmental education research, we continue to search for critically reflexive approaches. In my own work with teachers who struggle to construct stories of their environmental education practice, the point is not that such narratives are true but that they may become truthful fictions through frequent repetitions across a range of contexts and through their credibility to practitioners of all sorts. Research accounts become reasonable in their resonances with broader collectives of meaning (see Hart, 2003). Without such attempts to interpret affect, emotions, feelings, and motivations as meaningful dimensions of human identity and place, we have virtually no way of understanding people's lived experiences as they exist in their imperfect, partial, historical, and contextual accounts of their experiences, full of contradictions, and as imposed fictions in memory as well as the exigencies of everyday life. We believe, as researchers, that our accounts of lived experience may ring true, however fragmented, contingent, and multiple within the social contexts inhabited. And our research will always be confronted by such anxieties and by the politics of intersubjectivity, so we had better get used to it. Rather than recoil in some fit of existential angst, we know that some stories are important and must be told, even as we, as researchers, learn how to accept critique warranted by our necessarily subjective process.
What we need to do, according to Skeggs (2002), is to use reflexivity as a way of sensitizing our research process as we learn to live responsibly in privileged positions; that is, we must try to ensure that our epistemological authority does not compromise our moral authority. Learning to see research as political (as well as multiple, historical, and contextual) involves more than casual appropriation of philosophical concepts or methodological approaches, but rather the serious study of the roots of our ontological/epistemological perspectives. Removal of the notion of certainty in research does not mean anything goes, but that we learn to acknowledge multiple truths and multiple ways of knowing. Environmental education research (as environmental education itself), in affirming that we cannot provide an ultimate rationale (foundation) for any given system of values, does not imply that one considers all views to be equal (i.e., relative). The question is not whether one position is right so much as why we have come to occupy and defend it. Our responsibility is to read widely and deeply and to engage in discussions and debates that expose our ideas and research practices to forms of reflexivity and to become more conscious of the politics of methodology, and of knowing and being, toward improved research praxis.
END NOTE
Those who regard science teaching as engaging in the disciplines of science and education where the serious processes of knowing are stressed and “the virtue of instrumental content knowledge” is valued may have at best a passing interest in examples of environmental “science” that provide relevance to their activities. However, those science educators who understand science from a wider, more encompassing perspective, and particularly those who value the virtue of social values and adopt a pluralist nature of science, may share considerably more philosophical ground with environmental educators. For example, Cobern (1998a), from the perspective of science education, argues that science as a social endeavor should be informed by constructivist epistemology and that the image of science portrayed to students should represent a variety of perspectives, such as cultural, political, economic, critical theory, and theological. This position counters the older view of science as culturally neutral and of science education that uncritically reproduces western or modern versions of universal truths in schools (see N. Gough, 1999).
According to Bybee (1993), Bybee and Deboer (1994), and Hurd (1969, 1970, 1998, 2000), the history of science education is one of oscillations among espoused goals that sometimes include an emphasis on the social aspects of science and sometimes eschew them. These arguments aside, constructivism and social constructivism, as theoretical constructs that provide perspective, seem to encourage a dialogue among science and environmental educators who accept that science is a socially mediated and value-laden activity and that social constructivism allows a more authentic version of science to be represented to students. If science is understood to be part of the social world in dialectical relationship with the natural world, then environmental and science educators have more to talk about, as do researchers in both arenas. With an underlying social constructivist epistemology in common, the scope of a research activity can expand to encompass constructivist/interpretivist, critical, and postmodern ways of knowing and the creation of knowledge, not only in scientific but in educational research, recognized as a social endeavor as well as a cognitive construction. This means science educators’ views of research must include conceptions of knowing and understanding as socially/culturally influenced. It also means conceiving of inquiry in science and education as subjective as well as political.
The point is, from research perspectives encountered by many environmental educators, although science is not totally explainable in social, political, or cultural terms, neither is it the pristine, monistic, acultural, ahistorical way of knowing it is purported to be by many devout interpreters of science education (Benson, 2001). The problem has been, in taking a social constructivist position to teaching, that teachers often do not know the presuppositions of teaching from that position. And the same is true for researchers who have not understood the epistemological/ ontological presuppositions among the various ways of knowing. Benson's (2001) explanation of social constructivism, as rooted in the sociology of knowledge, where construction of meaning is rooted in social settings, is instructive for researchers who work beyond positivist methods. The way an individual interprets the world and creates personal understanding, he says, is influenced by five features: knowledge of history (as learned in culture), the particular social context of the research, the researcher's personal life history, the purposes attached to the research (as a sense-making process), and the research act itself (as an act of creating meaning). Thus, we can have similar understandings, but they may be created individually and contextually in ways that influence how we understand this knowledge/understanding.
Extended to social science and to educational research, the suggestion is that researchers use a socially based interpretive method to account for methodological choice and to establish evaluative criteria according to that choice. So conceived, it is absolutely crucial that the researchers lay out epistemological/ontological and methodological assumptions from which their arguments are constructed. This obligates researchers to know why they are researching from a social constructivist, critical, poststructuralist, or any other perspective or combination of perspectives. If research in science education and environmental education is to be recognized and justified as a human creation influenced by social/cultural issues, it implies that science education researchers who maintain a strict realist view of research might be ignoring developments in educational/social science research, as illustrated by the requisite variety in environmental education. More seriously, such researchers may be ignoring recent developments in the philosophy of science and how the nature of research (and of science) is interpreted. It is necessary to engage in these discussions in any attempt to portray a field of research as distinct from science education, but also to engage in the politics of research that this engagement entails. To do less would be to abrogate our responsibilities as social science researchers to theorize our practices, a matter as serious as the failure to ground our theories in practice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Joe Heimlich and Ian Robottom, who reviewed this chapter.
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