This is my history of environmental education in Australia to put with the other histories. I’ll defend this one though as for a while I had a ringside seat, I knew quite a few of the actors and was occasionally also inthe ring.
Action research applied to direct observation had the potential to teach us a lot about environmental education and it seems, sex education. Our gathering of international practitioners at an action research workshop in Frascati finally solved the mystery of extreme litter – and the thesis fitted the observations comprehensively.
Waterkeepers Australia was established to support formally-consituted community advocate organisations use environment and planning laws to care for and protect their waterways. This is how and why Waterkeepers Australia caame into being.
Australia was one of the 19 member countries in the OECD project Environent and School Initiatives for which I was our National Coordinator. Here is the report of the In-Depth Study team that looked at policy and programs in environmental education in four Australian states.
If you are confident in the bush you’ll more likely go there, you’ll want it to be there and so you’re likely to care for and protect it. This is education FOR the environment. I present some analyses regarding our curent relationship with the environment and what we can do to change.
The links between environmental education and community are so interchangeable that can be the other. This article, which appeared in Education Quarterly, describes how learning about a creek is much about citizenship education as it is about wate flows and biodiversity.
I spent a few days over Easter on an island off Wilson’s Promontory, a glorious wild place with those lovely feelings of isolation and not a Man Friday footprint on …
Humans face environmental challenges as never before, in many cases through our own deliberate actions. We didn’t intend this to be the result however. The environmental crises we now face stem fundamentally, I argue, from the way we perceive the environment. We act individually rather than collectively, we simply do not understand that environments can different and so call for different perceptions and experiences and we look for simplistic responses. We must change the ways we think about our environment, away from being exploitative, hostile and reductionist, as a prerequisite to changing the way we interact with our environment.
Science isn’t what it used to be. To turn out students who understand how their world works and who can make decisions for the world to work for all, a broader view of science teaching is needed. Some aspects of this broader view are discussed and some implications for the way science teachers work are presented.