The Distinctive Characteristics of Environmental Education Research in Australia: An Historical and Comparative Analysis

When considering a topic as broad as research in environmental education it seems worthwhile, at the outset, to make some basic distinctions. First, establishing research priorities is not simply an empirical question. While it is undoubtedly useful to try to establish perceived needs and interests, and to consider them when establishing research priorities, this can only describe part of the task at hand. There are surely some logical requirements as well.Second, a much more challenging task, it seems to me, is to more clearly understand the nature of the questions to which we seek answers. We must seek to distinguish between those research techniques which are more or less consistent with the nature of our task. Unfortunately, research in education generally, and in environmental education, in particular, has been hindered by a failure on the part of the research community to recognize the need for a more complete range of research perspectives than those customarily found, and by a failure to recognize the occasional and inevitable misapplications of technique which can occur when appropriate methodologies do not seem available.With some misgivings about the scope of research in environmental education in mind, I am led to my concern: How do we go about furthering our understanding of concepts central to our field of study? In exploring this question I propose that conceptual analysis is an important research area. Further, I also argue that it is not simply an option, but rather a logical necessity if we are to establish greater coherence within environmental education and avoid unnecessary confusion (see for example: Barrow & Milburn, 1986; Scheffler, 1960; Soltis, 1978; and Wilson, 1969). Further, it is in the nature of this question that we find appeal for this particular approach to research.

In this paper, we reflect on a study in Brazil’s Cerrado that attempts to address a lack of attention to an aesthetic dimension in environmental education practice and research. We start by tracing this lack to the overvaluing of the cognitive sphere in the educational process, noting its echo in the low aesthetic value attributed to the Cerrado biome. Then, through reflecting on an empirical, interview based study of sensations, perceptions and feelings evoked by aesthetic experiences in the Cerrado, we draw on insights from a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to identify key themes for environmental education research and practice in this regard. These include: recognising the singularity of experience; attending to the qualities of experience; acknowledging the value/s of ‘lighter’ and ‘darker’ experiences; and deepening emotions and verbal communication. In our final considerations, we discuss the limitations of the study, alongside new directions in studies of perception, experience, aesthetics and pedagogy that may also advance attention to an aesthetic dimension in environmental education practice and research.

This research explores the diversity of topics related to environmental education issues and students’ environmental concerns regarding their behavior. The bibliometric method is a quantitative approach used to measure and investigate specific indicators within the literature published in a particular field. This method involves creating knowledge maps using extensive databases to identify patterns and trends. Using the keyword “environmental education” on Scopus from 2018 to 2023, 365 relevant documents were found. In the PRISMA flow diagram, the process started with 7550 traced documents, narrowing down to 2536 relevant documents through screening. From these, 776 related documents were chosen, and 573 relevant documents were recognized after the inclusion stage. Throughout, a total of 365 publications were included in the study. VOS viewer software was used to analyze data and generate bibliographic maps and networks. In the last five years, research on environmental education has experienced exciting fluctuations. Key sources like Sustainability Switzerland and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health have played a significant role. Research by Bogner, F.X. stands out, reflecting high interest in environmental issues and education within the scientific community. Universities such as Universidad de Granada and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia contribute significantly. The United States leads in publications. Environmental education research remains crucial for sustainable practices and environmental literacy despite fluctuations. This data provides essential guidance for future research planning. This research not only underscores the increasing research emphasis on the educational ramifications of pandemics but also identifies specific areas that warrant more extensive exploration.

The need for more radical forms of learning-centred transformation is increasingly recognised in transformations to sustainability. Yet these approaches to learning remain under-developed and undertheorised especially from a politics and environmental education research perspective. This paper offers a review of an emerging politics of transgression in environmental education research, as developed through an extensive T-learning (transgressive learning in times of climate change) knowledge co-production research programme, spanning eight years, and continuing. The ongoing problem that the research programme seeks to address is how to do transgressive learning in/as environmental education research in times where the fall out of coloniality and fossil capital collide in an increasingly regressive political landscape which Akomolafe and Ladha (2017, pg. 820) describe as “the deadening ideology of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white supremacy and anthropocentrism.” Through the paper, I seek to highlight a “low theory” (Wark, 2021) of transgressive politics in environmental education research, embodied in practices of transgressive politics as movement in co-engaged T-learning research, which I illuminate through a meta-reflective curational process from the ‘archive’ or T-learning knowledge commons collection.

This article explores the evolution of the relationship between the inquirer and participant within a narrative inquiry conducted in the field of environmental education. Our focus is on how relational ethics contribute to the creation of narrative spaces that cultivate a caring and reciprocal relationship, where respect, trust, and productive self-reflection foster personal and professional growth for both parties. Building on this, we discuss the potential to reenvision research in environmental education—and beyond—as a caring and reciprocal experience. Ultimately, we advocate for the view that educational research should serve as a platform that fosters interactions promoting democracy, through cooperation and equitable dialogue, and ethical growth through care and reciprocity.

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions exist at the intersection of ‘education’ and ‘ethics’, and that they point to an area of research that deserves more attention. In describing the intersecting nature of these ideas, I show that how education is conceived in turn shapes interpretations of ethics, and vice versa. Seen this way, I also show how ethics inquiry in an educational context can be conceived as a means to explore controversy, dissonance, unconventional ideas, and to imagine new possibilities. Finally, I argue that research at this intersection of education and ethics can provide insights that can enable us to teach, inquire, and ultimately live as if the world mattered.

This chapter compares the flower fairies of Cicely Mary Barker with Elsa Beskow’s plant–human hybrids to explore how they might be read as contributing to such a cognitive shift by re-visioning how humans live with plants. Recent research in environmental education has found that children can develop moral and affective understandings of plants. A relational poetics of plant–human interactions emerges from contrasting the works of Barker and Beskow. Environmental philosophers and educators have developed various concepts to describe how to think about human and more-than-human differences and connections. The image of entanglement is an effective means for thinking about child–plant relationships. Since humans could not survive without plants, people are all “entangled in an assemblage of collective vulnerability”. The association of plants with fairies is an old one in the English literary tradition. Elsa Beskow began her career as an illustrator earlier than Barker began hers and also had more formal training than Barker.

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps usto expose the facticity of the field's heteronormative constructedness. These stories suggest alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)producing both the subjects/objects of our inquiries and our identities as researchers. The contributors draw on a variety of theoretical resources from art history, deconstruction, ecofeminism, literary criticism, popular cultural studies, and feminist poststructuralism to perform an orientation to environmental education research that we hope will never be arrested by its categorization as a "new genre." © 2011 by Revista Estudos Feministas.

Históricamente se ha reconocido en la educación ambiental una tradición participativa y horizontal. Pese a ello, las investigaciones empíricas describen bajos niveles de inclusión de niños, niñas y adolescentes en este tipo de educación y en su rama investigativa: son escasas las investigaciones que miden esta intervención, limitándose a describir casos de estudio. Para precisar aquello, se realizó una revisión bibliográfica sistematizada de las investigaciones de educación ambiental escritas en español desde 1999 a 2019, en las cuales participaron niños, niñas y adolescentes en diferentes grados de involucramiento. Se codificó el nivel de participación por medio de la escalera de Roger Hart, la cual describe ocho peldaños distintos. Esto fue correlacionado mediante análisis estadísticos y pruebas no paramétricas con el año y país de publicación, el tipo de educación y la metodología empleada. Los resultados indican un aumento progresivo de los niveles de participación infantil y adolescente de1999 a la fecha, como también niveles más altos en la educación ambiental no formal, sise consideran metodologías cualitativas para investigar (autores de Argentina y Cuba). Se discute la importancia de repensar el lugar de niños, niñas y adolescentes en el desarrollo de la educación e investigación ambiental.

This research has been motivated by the necessity of understanding the essential concept of education and of having critical attitudes related to the common sense about the aims of education. Researches related to the concepts of education and environmental education can help us to understand the fundamental principles that are being chosen to justify and to carry out environmental education programs. So, trying to understand tendencies in environmental education researcher's conceptions in Brazil we carried out an analysis of the articles presented in The First Environmental Education Research Meeting (I EPEA). The main questions proposed are: 1 - what conceptions of education and environmental education can be identified in the articles presented in I EPEA? 2 - What evidences can be raised from these articles to help us to identify such conceptions? Through content analysis we tried to identify meaningful excerpts to the research purposes and to categorize them in a thematical process. The political dimension of education, linked to the process of social transformation and citizenship, was one of the main aspects find out in the articles. Participation, interdisciplinarity, values, the relationship between local and global aspects of environmental issues and controversial issues were objectives or methodological principles presented in I EPEA articles. Nevertheless, it is relevant to point out that we could find some elements that permit us to link them to a traditional view of education or a view that goes in the direction of technicality in education. Risks of a pragmatic view or of an instrumentalism conception of environmental education present in these articles are mentioned.

The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

This article reflects on and responds to the eight articles that interacted with my 2024 book, Gender and Environmental Education: Feminist and Other(ed) Perspectives. It draws together some of the important themes illuminated and interrogated by the respondents and suggests future directions for research in gender and environmental education. These include: the need for unforgetting; using the concept of the Capitalocene to name the root cause of the climate change emergency; engaging non-Western perspectives; implementing anticolonial methodologies; researching intersectionality and for multispecies justice; promoting interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in order to understand environmental problems better; re-thinking strategies, and changing school curricula so that they incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and caring for the environment.

The study reported in this paper emerged from a concern that despite 20 years of theorizing about the practice of environmental education in Australian schools it continues to be marginalized in the school curriculum. The educational problem we set out to address was how to improve teaching and learning in relation to environmental issues in schools and the broader community in Australia. In this paper we position our study in relation to Rickinson's report on research focused on learners and learning in environmental education. We also draw on Hart and Nolan's 1999 paper on trends in environmental education research. We argue that while the aims of environmental education are well documented, and there is agreement that environmental education in schools is an important strategy in achieving environmental improvement, little is known about the environmental understandings held by children. Our study sought to provide data on the environmental understandings of young people. In order to achieve this aim we linked with government and community groups who also had an interest in the outcomes of the study. We report on the outcomes of the study and specifically in relation to the working partnership we had with 'partner groups'.

One of the key on-going debates in environmental education research and practice relates to the content and goals of programmes. Specifically, there is a long history of debate between advocates of educational perspectives that emphasise the teaching of science concepts and those that seek to more actively link environmental and social issues. In practice, educators and organisations respond to these tensions in a variety of ways, often due to the particular social and economic contexts in which they are located. This chapter explores these debates about the ‘appropriate’ content and aims of programmes by looking at the case of environmental educators working within two conservation organisations in Monteverde, Costa Rica. It reveals that environmental education (i) is an important local site of debate about understandings of the natural world and humans’ relationships to it, and (ii) is part of much wider struggles over the control of processes of local development and environmental management.

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as applied in the environmental education research project that informs this article, abandons hierarchical comparisons of plants, which are often historically positioned as “lesser species,” mere “objects” and “resources” even. We start our paper with a modest review of key theoretical approaches informing past and recent environmental education studies on child-plant relations. We then return to the discussion started within the introduction to the paper on how we have theorised a vegetal ontology as a mode of a relational ontology focussing particularly on human-plant relations and drawing on posthumanist, new materialist and Indigenous approaches. To conclude the paper, we then put this newly named vegetal ontology to work. We apply it to a recent study on childhood-plant encounters where researchers engaged with young children and their families in a botanical garden setting and a group of environmental education elders reflected on the significance of plant relations in their childhoods.