M. J. Barrett

Education for the environment: action competence, becoming, and story

A recent United Nations’ report claims that nearly two-thirds of the Earth’s natural systems are unhealthy or failing, and many point to education—environmental education, education for sustainable development, or sustainability education—as a key means of addressing these issues. Learning about environmental problems is not sufficient, however (see Hart & Nolan, 1999; Rickinson, 2001; Kollmus & Agyeman, 2002). As Russell and Hodson (2002, p. 489) claim, ‘it is not enough for students to be armchair critics’; they need to get their hands dirty and learn how to take action. It is this action-orientation that characterizes ‘education for the environment’. Yet taking action is often not part of typical schooling processes (Stevenson, 1987), and frequently meets with resistance (see Lousley, 1999; Barrett et al., 2005; Barrett & Sutter, 2006). Furthermore, a puzzling disconnect exists between those who possess environmental knowledge and awareness, but lack the propensity to act (see, for example, Environmental Education Research, 2002, 8(3)). In this vignette, I shall engage the ideas of Jensen and Schnack (1997), and Payne (2003) to explore, and complicate ‘education for the environment’. I draw on my experiences of both gardening and conducting ‘post’-informed narrative research (see Hart, 2005) with a high school outdoor/environmental education teacher in order to illustrate and reflect on these themes. The stimulus papers by Jensen and Schnack (1997) and Payne (2003), are both concerned with what and who environmental education is for, in the sense that all environmental education is, in some way or other, education for the environment. Taken together, the authors examine the kinds of experiences, knowledge and ways of being that might lead to environmentally-focused student action. Jensen and Schnack (1997) support the development of students’ action competence, which they suggest is an interdisciplinary type of knowledge that focuses on students’ abilities to envision a future they want, and reflect on and respond to current health and

Homework and fieldwork: investigations into the rhetoric–reality gap in environmental education research and pedagogy

For years, environmental educators have been arguing that the culture of schooling (mostly focused on cultural reproduction) is antithetical to environmental education. Within this context, it is often suggested that environmental education occurs when there is a particularly passionate and motivated teacher who, despite frequent barriers, maintains environmental education as a priority. Yet the author’s doctoral research suggests that even strong beliefs, significant skills, and an ideal program structure do not lead to the implementation of effective environmental education. Drawing on narrative inquiry, arts‐based research and poststructural analysis, this study examines ways in which the privileging of the intellect in research and pedagogy may be making effective environmental education almost impossible.

Sea Country: navigating Indigenous and colonial ontologies in Australian environmental education

In this paper, we contribute to land education research by focusing on the Torres Strait Islands in the Coral Sea at the far north of tip of Cape York, Australia. We describe the Torres Strait Islander concept of Sea Country and Torres Strait Ailan Kastom (translated as ‘Island Custom’). We then analyse some of the ways in which settler colonisation has challenged these ways of knowing and being. Our inquiry looks at how Sea Country is positioned within two contemporary Australian examples of environmental education: firstly, within the new Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities that mandate that special attention be given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and also to the concept of sustainability; and secondly, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Sea Country Guardians programme This analysis of environmental education curriculum and practice identifies the ways in which the concept of Sea Country and the Indigenous cosmology it represents are simultaneously supported and ignored in the current Australian environmental education context.

Participatory Pedagogy in Environmental Education: Reproduction or Disruption?

Despite good intentions, participatory research and pedagogy can masquerade as an open process but still impose agendas that support particular versions of what constitutes appropriate thought, behaviour, and action. This chapter draws together two studies with some explication of feminist post-structural notions of the self in order to suggest ways in which feminist post-structural analyses might produce different readings of student responses to participatory pedagogies that have environmental change as their aim. Conceiving of the subject as discursively constituted opens up the self to both an interrogation into its construction and its possible reconstitution. It also opens up new ways of understanding student agency and helps bring to light how the discursive production of the self can limit students’ ability to challenge dominant discourses and take up counter-hegemonic ones. Furthermore, a feminist post-structural analysis of power resists the tendency to ‘blame the victim’ when teachers or students do not ‘get it right’.

Shifting Relations with the More-than-Human: Six Threshold Concepts for Transformative Sustainability Learning.

Using the iterative process of action research, we identify six portals of understanding, called threshold concepts, which can be used as curricular guideposts to disrupt the socially constituted separation, and hierarchy, between humans and the more-than-human. The threshold concepts identified in this study provide focal points for a curriculum in transformative sustainability learning which (1) acknowledges non-human agency; and (2) recognizes that the capacity to work with multiple ways of knowing is required to effectively engage in the process of sustainability knowledge creation. These concepts are: there are different ways of knowing; we can communicate with non-human nature and non-human nature can communicate with us; knowing is relational; transrational intuition and embodied knowing are valuable and valid ways of knowing; worldview is the lens through which we view reality; and the power of dominant beliefs (represented in discourse) supports and/or undermines particular ways of knowing and being as in/valid.

Reflections on the 7th Invitational Seminar on Research and Development in Health and Environmental Education: Anchorage, Alaska, USA, October 2003

In October 2003, the seventh meeting of the Seminar on Research and Development in Health and Environmental Education took place in Anchorage. What follows here are ®ve re ̄ective commentaries on that event. The ®rst, by Paul Hart and M. J. Barrett, contextualizes the event from the perspective of two people who shouldered the burdens of organization. There then follow the thoughts of four of the forty, or so, participants: Karsten Schnack, Janet Dyment, Jim Taylor and Charlotte Clark. EER is pleased to publish all these accounts in order to mark what everyone present seemed to regard as a signi®cant (and enjoyable) event in the development of the ®eld. Other re ̄ections on this or related events will, as ever, be welcomed.

Responding to Environmental Crises Through Multi-media Hypertextual Research Representation

Through engaging in issues of research representation, this vignette takes up questions of what counts as knowledge in education research, and who gets to create and adjudicate it. The doctoral research study upon which the paper draws, uses the tools of Web 2.0 to both develop and support a representational response to human “autism” to the voices of the natural world. Poised at the cusp of what some call “the great turning”, the thesis and its dialogic methodology introduced starting tools to support those shifts in consciousness long recognized as critical for social, environmental, and economic sustainability.