WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION?
Environmental education may best be defined as a process
directed at creating awareness and understanding about environmental issues
that leads to responsible individual and group actions. Successful
environmental education focuses on processes that promote critical
thinking, problem solving, and effective decision-making skills. Environmental
education utilizes processes that involve students in observing, measuring,
classifying, experimenting, and other data gathering techniques. These
processes assist students in discussing, inferring, predicting, and
interpreting data about environmental issues.
Environmental education offers the long-term solution to
environmental problems. The World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, 1980) has
emphasized that a new ethic must be developed in which humankind lives in
harmony with the natural world. Formal education provides an obvious route
through which this can be achieved.
There have been several impressive efforts to promote environmental
studies at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels (e.g. Chase, 1990;
Foster-Smith, 1990; Nowell and Hollister, 1990). The impact of environmental
education programmes for young people will not, however, be immediate because
there is an inevitable time lag before the children or students, who are being
educated, are in planning or decision-making roles. A further concern is that
the single subject approach at secondary and tertiary levels inhibits the
introduction of cross-curriculum teaching of the kind needed in environmental
education.
WHAT IS
QUALITY ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION?
1 Fairness
and accuracy: EE materials should be fair and
accurate in describing environmental problems, issues, and conditions, and in
reflecting the diversity of perspectives on them.
Factual accuracy
Balanced presentation of differing viewpoints
and theories
Openness to inquiry
Reflection
of diversity
2 Depth: EE materials should foster awareness of the
natural and built environment, and an understanding of environmental concepts,
conditions, and issues, and an awareness of the feelings, values, attitudes,
and perceptions at the heart of environmental issues, as appropriate for
different developmental levels.
Awareness
Focus on concepts
Concepts in context
Attention to
different scales
3 Emphasis
on skills building: EE
materials should build lifelong skills that enable learners to prevent and
address environmental issues.
Critical and creative thinking
Applying skills to issues
Action
skills
4 Action
orientation: EE materials should promote
civic responsibility, encouraging learners to use their knowledge, personal
skills, and assessments of environmental issues as a basis for environmental
problem solving and action.
Sense of personal stake and responsibility
Self-efficacy
5
Instructional soundness: EE
materials should rely on instructional techniques that create an effective
learning environment.
Learner-centered instruction
Different ways of learning
Connection to learners' everyday lives
Expanded
learning environment
Interdisciplinary
Goals and objectives
Appropriateness for specific learning
settings
Assessment
6 Usability: EE materials should be well designed and
easy to use.
Clarity and logic
Easy to use
Long lived
Adaptable
Accompanied by instruction and support
Make substantiated claims
Fit with
national, state, or local requirements