Place, Community and Collective Action

Abstract

Education in/through the environment, or education with the environment (to use Gough’s (1987) phrase), can play a substantial role in raising environmental awareness, cultivating environmental sensitivity, challenging and re-ordering existing environmental values, and developing new ones. Gough (1989), for example, describes how the kind of experiences advocated by the Earth Education movement (van Matre, 1979, 1990; van Matre & Johnson, 1988; Cohen, 1990; Johnson, 2007) can be utilized in re-orienting students’ environmental understanding, taking them beyond the superficial to embrace the complexity, diversity, interconnectedness and dynamic nature of the natural environment. Some years ago, Woolnough and Allsop (1985) talked about the importance of students “getting a feel for phenomena” through handson experiences in the laboratory as a prerequisite for good conceptual understanding. The same kind of preparation may be essential to gaining the kind of conceptual understanding of the natural environment that leads to environmental literacy. So many of today’s children are strangers to the natural world, spending their time in a world of steel, glass and concrete. For them, nature exists as tiny isolated pockets — a small park, a window box, a tree-lined avenue here and there. Many are so protected and so urbanized that they have never felt the rough bark of a tree, experienced total darkness or silence, seen the full glory of the milky way, heard an owl’s call, watched a spider spin a web, or even paddled barefoot in a stream or pond. They haven’t walked in the forest, climbed a mountain, sailed down a river or explored a cave. They increasingly live in a virtual environment, with experience mediated by computerized devices that entail sensory deprivation of the natural kind and its substitution by the bleeps and burps of electronic gadgets. In consequence, their understanding of the natural environment is minimal and their attitudes towards it are ill-informed.