Environmental Education

Objectives and Guiding Principles

Curriculum objectives relating to awareness, knowledge, attitude, skills, and participation have been continuing themes in the development of the field of environmental education. One change of emphasis, however, has been in the scope of the environmental focus that has shifted from the biophysical environment to the total environment—natural and built, technological and social (economic, political, technological, cultural-historical, moral, aesthetic)—to the three pillars of sustainable development—environment, society, and economy.

In the 1970s, as a result of the 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on the Environment, the formation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and several United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)–UNEP intergovernmental conferences on environmental education, a set of goals and objectives for environmental education were agreed upon that have continued to form the fundamental principles for the field. However, through successive UN meetings, environmental education has evolved over past decades to have a contentious relationship with the more recently described area of education for sustainable development.

Environmental education has been interpreted as both curriculum product and curriculum process. It requires a change in the curriculum content to include the knowledge and skills that were seen as an essential component of the area, but it is also a way of learning associated with changing attitudes, behaviors, and participation in society.

A complicating factor for environmental education as both a product and as a process has been that it does not neatly fit into any traditional subject areas of the curriculum, and its interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary nature has meant that it has often been marginalized in traditional schooling as a result.

Although there was an apparent consensus about the goals, objectives, and guiding principles for environmental education in the period immediately following the 1977 Tbilisi UNESCO–UNEP intergovernmental conference, this consensus also included a dissatisfaction with what had been produced, a dissatisfaction that subsequently led to a variety of contestations about the field. These contestations include the nature of the view of curriculum appropriate for environmental education, how environmental education is implemented in the formal curriculum, truncation of discussion on the nature of environmental education, the implications for education of the holistic nature of environmental problems, and the socially constructed nature of the environment and of education.

Some of the contestations had also occurred during the preceding 1975 Belgrade UNESCO–UNEP international workshop on environmental education. For example, many of the authors of position papers, who were mostly from the developed world, reflected the biases of educational structures and environmental concerns of their countries. Their papers were about the curriculum and needs of environmental education without reference to the nature and special characteristics of the environmental situation itself: for them, environmental education was like any other subject or new theme in the curriculum. However, other participants from the developing world drew attention to the raison d'être of environmental education being the world environmental situation and that the characteristics of that situation—not those of traditional education—should provide the framework and criteria for this education.

...