One thing about which there is widespread consensus is that the earth and its inhabitants are in social and environmental peril. This is where the consensus ends, however, for there is equally widespread disagreement as to the nature and causes of the problems (more social or more environmental), the severity of the problems (for whom are they recognised and felt as problems), and the most appropriate and effective solutions necessary to deal with them. This paper argues for the adoption of a critical, feminist perspective in examining the area of Environmental Education (EE) as an ‘appropriate response’ to this globally perceived socio-environmental crisis.

Historically, environmental education emerged out of the early 1970's during the time when the environmental movement was gaining momentum and vitality on a worldwide scale (Disinger, 1983; Robottom, 1985a; Stapp, 1970). It was envisioned by the international participants at the three major UNESCO-UNEP Environment Conferences held that decade, that EE was the most appropriate and hopeful educational response to the crisis situation of the deterioration of quality of life and the environment (Fensham, 1978).

The aims of EE that emerged from the UN conference in Tbilisi, USSR in 1977 were particularly ambitious in that they transcended a concern with the roles, objectives and guiding principles of EE and spelled out the need for an understanding of:

In recent years discussions surrounding early childhood curriculum has focused on the movement from developmental to sociocultural theory. A further area worthy of investigation involves the role of content in early childhood education, specifically the relationship between content, context and pedagogy. The paper draws on teacher vignettes to consider how environmental education can be represented as a content area in early years education. Issues associated with environmental education as an emerging area of importance in early childhood education are also discussed.

In this paper I examine two activities which are often attributed with a role to play in social transformation, namely environmental education and research, for their potential to contribute to collective change. I do so by drawing on the results of a recent empirical study in southern Africa, in which I distinguished four orientations to research in/and environmental education. In exploring the transformatory roles of research and environmental education, as conceptualised in these four orientations, I conclude that the most prevalent orientations reveal modernistic assumptions which limit their potential to contribute to social transformation.

The decision to interpret the results by focusing on social transformation grew out of what I regarded as the most significant dimensions of the context of the study. These are the global and regional calls for social transformation in response to the environment crisis, the dramatic political changes in parts of southern Africa, the need to improve education in the region, and finally, less obvious global epistemological shifts in the conceptualisation of science, education and social research.

The rapid development of renewable energy technologies has a number of implications for environmental educators and educators more generally. The costs of a number of renewable energy technologies are expected to be competitive with fossil fuels within 10–15 years and some installations are competitive already. From 2006–2011 global installations increased an average of 26% per annum for wind power and 58% per annum for solar photovoltaics (REN21, 2012). Investment in renewables (excluding hydropower) has increased by 20–30% per annum, reaching $US260 billion (AUD 245 billion) in 2011. The credibility of proposals for economies based largely on renewables is gaining recognition. These developments suggest that a satisfactory response to the dire projections around climate change can be implemented. To do so, understanding of the potential and status of renewables needs to be more widespread and accelerated on formal, informal and policy-making levels. Environmental educators within formal and informal settings can promote understanding and action so that the potential of such renewable energies is realised.

This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resource base for economic and social development’ (United Nations, 2002, p. 2) and how this instrumentalisation of nature is produced by discourses and ‘ecotechnologies’ that ‘identify and define the natural realm in our relationship with it’ (Boetzkes, 2010, p. 29). This denaturation of nature is reflected in the priorities for sustainable development discussed at Rio+20 and proposed successor UNESCO projects. The article argues for the need to reassert the intrinsic value of ‘environment’ in education discourses and discusses strategies for so doing. The article is intended as a wake-up call to the changing context of the ‘environment’ in ESD discourses. In particular, we need to respond to the recent UNESCO (2013a, 2013b) direction of global citizenship education as the successor to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014 that continues to reinforce an instrumentalist view of the environment as part of contributing to ‘a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable world’ (UNESCO, 2013a, p. 3).

In June 2020, an Australian Curriculum (AC) review was announced, particularly regarding content crowding in primary years, flexibility and deep understanding of core concepts. The language of the announcement highlighted again the ‘competing-priorities’ discourse that suggests a disjuncture between focusing on fundamental knowledge and skills of literacy and numeracy and providing opportunities to develop broader conceptual understandings and skills inherent in the pedagogies of education for global citizenship (EGC) and education for sustainable development (ESD). By contrast, the School Strike 4 Climate rallies exemplified students’ integration of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes from a variety of disciplines and broader learning experiences embedded within the AC with the cross-curriculum priorities, particularly sustainability, and the general capabilities. This article claims that the School Strike 4 Climate rallies highlight the interconnection between EGC and ESD and the AC. It will argue that the inquiry-based, pedagogical approaches of EGC and ESD are powerful integrators offering teachers the opportunity to take cross-disciplinary approaches to planning, connecting multiple learning areas from the AC with real-world projects and issues. It is suggested that, far from crowding the curriculum, such integration frees up space and offers opportunities for the deep conceptual understanding the curriculum review seeks.

The current “Australian-ness” of outdoor environmental education is an evolving “set” of socio-cultural constructions. These constructions can be interpreted within the circumstances of an empirical study of tertiary study abroad students' participation in an undergraduate semester long unit “Experiencing the Australian Landscape” (EAL) as an ambivalent mixture of belonging and beach, or solidity and fuidity. This ambivalence imparts various meanings within and about the Australian context of beach as a “place”. The study is based on an interpretive mixed method ethnographic and phenomenological small-scale case study. It fnds that the beach experience is infuenced by various social discourses, such as neocolonialism, individualism and mobility. Participants experienced the beach in a fuid sense of non-belonging, despite the EAL intention of fostering a place-responsive pedagogy. In order to understand their experience and its alleged link to an enhanced environmental awareness, an embodied dialectic descriptive interpretation of place experience is suggested.

In this paper we suggest that learning about natural history experientially can be thought of as a type of reading, where understanding is developed by using particular skills, processes and content. In our experience, teaching and learning natural history involves the generation of knowledge and understanding through relating direct personal observations of aspects of the natural world to broader cultural and conservation issues. We therefore argue that teaching Australian natural history that reflects the particular social, cultural and environmental circumstances of the place in which it is undertaken requires pedagogical research and informed debate. In this paper we highlight this neglected aspect of pedagogical research within Australian outdoor and environmental education and discuss our experiences of teaching natural history to undergraduate students to stimulate discussion and challenge researchers-educators to develop practices that are informed by the natural history of this continent.

This paper presents the findings of the first stage of research on the impact of the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI) at an independent primary school in Western Australia. A longitudinal (20 year) case study is being conducted, utilising data related to Education for Sustainability (EfS) at the school from 1990-2009. 2005 was a critical year for the school because it marked the beginning of participation in the Sustainable Schools Initiative pilot in Western Australia (AuSSI-WA). The research investigates elements of EfS in operation at the school pre- and post- AuSSI-WA, as well as student and teacher outcomes after involvement in the Initiative. An analysis of the initial data suggests that participation in AuSSI-WA enabled the school to engage with a growing commitment to EfS in the context of a whole - school approach.

In Queensland, Australia, a new senior Earth and Environmental Science (EES) syllabus has been approved for first implementation in 2019. Given the natural alignment between EES and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), this study employs document analysis to investigate the extent to which the intended curriculum reflects the tenets of ESD. An exploratory content analysis examined the frequency of keywords to identify any prominent sustainability themes that might underpin the syllabus, while a curriculum key guided a deeper analysis according to four tenets of ESD: Learning content; Pedagogy and learning environments; Societal transformation; and Learning outcomes. These analyses found that the ESD tenets reflected in the syllabus is limited chiefly to sustainability learning content, while broader notions of ESD, like the promotion of transformative learning, are marginalised or absent. Instead, the syllabus reflects a technical orientation to curriculum, underpinned by a neoliberal agenda. It is argued that the Queensland EES syllabus represents a missed opportunity to engage students with ESD. In a policy climate where achievement and accountability dominate educational discourse, there is an inherent risk that ESD will fall by the wayside, given it is not prioritised in the intended curriculum. Implications for curriculum development are also discussed.

The Waste Wise Schools Program was established by EcoRecycle Victoria to implement waste and litter education in Victorian schools. It is now operating in over 900 schools in Victoria and 300 schools in other Australian states / territories. This paper provides detailed case studies of two active schools in the Waste Wise Schools Program and considers for each school how the Program started, what it meant to the school, the environmental, educational, social and economic outcomes of the Program and the key success factors. It discusses evidence that the Program has changed the thinking and behaviour of many families at the schools, suggesting that the children may be acting as catalysts to influence their parent's waste wise behaviour, i.e. having an intergenerational influence. Guidelines for promoting this influence are proposed.

We share a story about a katitjin bidi, a learning journey in a bioregion with a multimillennial Aboriginal history. As part of this katitjin bidi, three environmental educators implemented a place-based pedagogy called ‘becoming family with place’, while a fourth participated in the preplanning and final reflective stages. Our story includes cycles of ways of knowing, resulting in an enriched practice of being-with our place. Our story is underpinned by Aboriginal epistemologies to reimagine regenerative futures linked with those of ‘the long now’ — the past, present and future here now. Ours is a particular story that lives in a particular southwest place. There are layers of meanings that live right across the landscapes in the southwest of Australia — and many of them are hiding in full view. You might like to try this pedagogy in school learning, teacher education, and community education contexts.

The first research symposium, organised in conjunction with the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) biennial conference, began with a dialogue between scholars at three different academic career stages. As we all entered the field at different periods in its development, the first part of our presentation and this article provide our perspectives on the context, approaches and issues that characterised the field at the time we became involved in environmental education (EE) and EE research. The second part of this article presents the lessons we have learnt from EE research, and where we see the field headed in the future.

This paper reports on a study into the environmental opinions and concerns of a sample of Brisbane children in the upper primary, junior and senior secondary years. The study adopted a qualitative approach. Children's opinions about the environments around them and beyond were gathered using open-ended question items and focus group discussions. The study revealed that the upper primary children participating were most obviously concerned about their immediate personal environments. The junior and senior secondary students were more concerned about their natural environments to which they showed strong positive associations. On the other hand, all participants wanted to undertake personal action for change in their social environments at local, national and global levels.

They thought they felt something, perhaps. The wisp of an outline not distinct enough to trace. Good. They circled it, at times, and at other times found themselves within. As they walked (a sort of walking. Figurative but real. Digital, but here. Over months of events), it curled open and headed in several directions. Foldings in the backcloth that furrowed them along until, as they walked and talked, they felt that perhaps a territory was becoming simultaneously clearer and more obscure, that they might find a way to enquire, even as it meant becoming the folds themselves. As they coalesce, Scott, Jamie, and Dave each come to this project differently (of course). From their own situations, with their own problems and with different voices and ways of writing. We (for the first shift in voice) take post-qualitative inquiry to be infused with a question mark, wary of attempts to make it a ‘thing’. Yet here we are, drawn to potentials, to the opening of conditions, to the possibility of something still to come. We hope to make a shift, to realise (as in make manifest) ontology and its everyday performance as synonymous with environmental education. Environmental education as a life.

The first review of environmental education in Australia was undertaken by Linke (1980) in 1973/4. The Curriculum Corporation on behalf of the Government Department of the Environment and Heritage undertook a second national review in 2002. The purpose of the review was to provide evidence for the development of future national initiatives in environmental education and as advice for environmental education practioners. Curriculum documents were reviewed to identify the existence of 147 indicators of environmental education within outcomes and objectives of curriculum documents in the compulsory years of schooling through to senior secondary. The similarities between the two reviews are evident in the identification of Science and Social Science in the compulsory years of schooling as having. direct references to environmental education. Geography at the senior secondary level also had significant explicit reference to environmental education. However, there were differences. The 2003 review identified environmental studies as a new secondary level subject that has environmental education objectives. It also identified a broader range of learning areas including Arts, Health and Physical Education, English and Technology which provided opportunities for the development of environmental education.

This paper sets out to establish a tentative implementation theory which can inform the work of teacher educators working with novice (student) teachers in their initial professional development related to environmental education. The paper begins with an exploration of the problem of how to encapsulate environmental education within pre-service programs by looking at attempts over the years to encourage and stimulate the professional development of the environmentally educated teacher through pre-service programs. The paper then reports on research carried out by the method of deliberative inquiry which examined the work of two environmental education initiatives: the OECD-funded ENSI project, a co-operative curriculum development program based in primary and secondary schools; and the European Union-funded EEITE program, a development initiative based in universities offering pre-service courses in eleven European Union member states. The paper discusses how ENSI'S aims and guiding principles and EEITE'S organizing principles, key elements and program characteristics were considered and a tentative implementation theory established. This theory, it is argued, constitutes a criterial framework of process skills and values which can inform and guide the inclusion of environmental education within pre-service teacher education programs. The paper ends with a call for a critique of the theory presented.

This is a version of a paper presented at the Second National Conference of the Australian Association for Environmental Education held in Brisbane in August 1982.

This paper will begin with an attempt to address the question: “What presuppositions about teaching and curriculum are embedded in the developed conception of environmental education as education for the environment?” The answers advanced here will be tentative in nature and obviously incomplete. They will, however, allow the discussion to advance to a consideration of teacher behaviours compatible with the education for the environment concept, and to an appreciation of the dilemmas confronting teachers of environmental education so conceived.

The widespread use and irresponsible disposal of single-use plastic shopping bags are posing a significant threat to environmental sustainability. The use of non-plastic reusable shopping bags (NPRSBs) is being promoted in several jurisdictions to avert this challenge. However, this form of pro-environmental behaviour is failing to embed among consumers in emerging markets. This study therefore examines the factors influencing the behaviour of using NPRSBs among consumers, using a modified theory of planned behaviour. Data were collected from 487 South African consumers using a structured questionnaire and were analysed using structural equation modelling. The results identified ‘attitudes’ and ‘personal norms’ as the building blocks for the formation of pro-reusable shopping bags use intentions, which, in turn, influence actual behaviour. The findings also pointed to the need to foster the development of descriptive norms related to the use of NPRSBs in order to enhance mainstream use. Accordingly, this study recommends the use of rational and norm-based strategies to stimulate the behaviour of using NPRSBs.

Traditionally, environmental education has been aimed at the community or in primary schools and governmental pressure to reduce environmental damage has focussed on large businesses. More recently, the role and importance of small business and how to engage them in the environmental debate has come under scrutiny. Researchers have identified education as one method of increasing the understanding of small business owner-managers' role and knowledge of practices that, when implemented, will reduce the negative impacts of their businesses. However, there is little attention given in the literature to the perspective of the small business owner-manager and environmental education. This research was conducted to begin to address this gap. Research results confirm that there is limited environmental education for small businesses and that there is a disconnect in meeting the needs of such a disparate group. Six elements were identified by the small business owner-managers in the design of environmental education for them: use of plain language, provision of best practice examples, industry specific information, solutions for immediate improvement, practical content and use of trusted sources to deliver the program.