INTERNATIONAL BEST PRACTICE: Environmental Education Processes

Notes for Thierry Lereverend: FEE Young reporters

By Jim Taylor (WESSA South Africa)

Overview

Thank you for your enquiry about strategic approaches to environmental education. In the last decade or so many researchers and experienced practitioners have challenged conventional approaches to environmental education and education for sustainable development that rely heavily on awareness raising, attitude change and hopeful notions of behaviour modification. Research, and experience has demonstrated that such thinking has not helped us much and in some instances has even set us back as people are alienated by centre to periphery (or top-down approaches). We recently compiled the following notes in response to a transfrontier project that covers South Africa and Lesotho. I hope they are useful for your strategic development processes and apologise for the delay in responding to your request. It is not an easy task, especially when one goes beyond usual expectations!

INTERNATIONAL BEST PRACTICE: Environmental Education Processes

This section seeks to provide a conceptual framework that moves beyond the simplistic transfer of knowledge or romantic notions of nature and cultural experiences as the basis for meaningful social change. Drawing on broad international trends in environmental education particularly in the context of the current United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) it is increasingly being realized that environment and sustainability issues are complex in that they involve not only the biophysical environment but the interactions between the biophysical dimension and the political, social, technological, economic and aesthetic dimensions. It is this complexity and the different ways that we have of making sense of this complexity that leads to different and often highly contested understandings of environmental issues and what sustainable development means. These understandings also change over time. There is a growing recognition that these different understanding are based not simply on mistaken beliefs or on lack of knowledge or understanding. They are often based on different interests and cultural perspectives and represent rational decision making processes based on these interests.

It is these features (complex, contested, contextual and emergent) of environmental issues and sustainable development that has a number of implications for the way in which environmental education and education for sustainable development are being conceptualized. If environmental issues are complex, involving the interactions between the biophysical dimension and the social, economic and political dimensions then environmental education needs to be holistic and equip learners to work in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields. Likewise if environmental issues are value laden and our understandings are shaped by the different, often conflicting, interests that are part of society, then environmental education needs to be critical and support learners to deconstruct different understandings and the effects that they have in our life worlds. As mentioned above these effects may vary from place to place. This requires that environmental education processes must be responsive to different contexts by enabling learners to explore and question issues in the situations in which they live and work. Similarly, because environmental issues, and the way that we understand them and the different interests at play, change over time it is its necessary to equip learners with reflexive skills that will enable them to think about and change the way that they learn and the kinds of information that they draw on as the situations around them change.

The above insights into environment issues and sustainable development, together with their implications for what would constitute best practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development, has had a significant shaping influence on the kinds of principles that shape curriculum design and capacity building processes. In a recent publication (Lotz Sisitka, 2005) from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), drawing on international literature, the following principles are suggested to inform curriculum course design in the fields of environmental education and education for sustainable development:

• A responsiveness to the complex and changing social, environmental and economic contexts within which participants live and work;
• Creating meaningful opportunities for participants to contribute to and shape the content of the course;
• Ensuring that the teaching and learning programmes are open and flexible enough to respond to individual participants needs and allow for participants to contribute to course processes.
• A recognition that within any practice there is a substantial amount of embedded theory and to provide opportunities to critically engage with this theory, its strengths and its weaknesses in different contexts.
• A commitment to ensuring that tutors and course coordinators work with participants in ways that enhance the contribution that participants make in their work and community contexts.
• All of the above implies and supports reflexivity in terms of evaluating what we do, understanding why we do it in that way, considering alternatives and having the capacity to support meaningful social transformation when appropriate.

It is these principles that have informed and shaped more open processes of teaching and learning. The Open Process Framework (UNEP, 2002) is one way of representing teaching and learning processes that are responsive, flexible and participatory. The frameworks seeks to mobilize the prior knowledge and understandings that participants bring into teaching and learning situations; it supports the finding and critique of information; it enables participants to question, explore and experiment in context; it supports the taking of meaningful action and the reporting on learning processes in ways that lead to social change. These processes are represented in the framework diagram below.

Approach

The ‘Open Process Framework’ seeks to avoid the “us and them” distance trap that many large scale plans for the environment have suffered from in the past. It also seeks to enable capacity building and awareness creation as part of a process which inevitably involves social change. It is important to note that this approach informs the way in which the environmental education can be conducted and provides a framework for understanding and the evaluation of different courses, resource materials and facilities.

In terms of this approach it is tempting to assume that once the scientific, legal and planning processes are completed and the information is available, an education (didactic) approach can then be used to convey the messages or information to the wider public. Such a didactic approach may be possible, and greater understanding may result from it (see Figure 1 ‘Conventional Interventions’), but to assume that such information, even if widely received and understood, is likely to be acted upon in a reasonable manner would be wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, meaningful social change and applied reasonable action does not come about from such centre-to-periphery or top-down processes. Neither can one assume that such processes can be inverted and taught or facilitated, in a different, bottom-up manner!

Experience suggests that people do acquire facts and information through message-centred didactic approaches but it is only through applied learning in action, and understanding through enquiry processes, that more reasonable action and social change may become possible. And, even then, unpredictable outcomes may occur! In this context an ‘open-process’ framework is recommended where, for example, the ‘sharing of the tools of science’ to enable learners to explore and grapple with the issues and risks in the region are used to support meaningful social change processes.

Consequently it is argued that if the overriding biodiversity goals are to be realised it is important that environmental education processes are integral within the wider scientific, cultural and legal enquiry processes (Figure 1. Open process). Such an orientation can enable the work to support wider and more meaningful social change.

It is evident that the approach adopted in this project is challenging conventional wisdom inherent in current development and educational approaches. In many cases (at global scale) projects have been well researched, designed and planned for roll out. However, they do not succeed at implementation level due, primarily to a lack of meaningful, applied fieldwork and the mobilisation of prior knowledge and understanding of local communities and wider stakeholder groups.

The approach being articulated here is only now gaining recognition since much of it is relatively new and still in need of further research and documentation. Consequently it is not yet perceived as being part of the conventional package promoted in the development arena.

Figure 1 : Meaningful Processes in Social Change