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Life-support learning. Are schoolrooms the best or only spaces for environmental education?

Environmental issues have grown to command ever more public attention and concern. At the same time, we have grown to realise that most human activities have direct or indirect impacts on the environment. Governments can and do support environmental education programmes to raise awareness and promote sound pro-environment attitudes throughout society. But does the widely cherished belief that children are most receptive to messages about environment, or best fitted to act on them, add up to a realistic response to this vital challenge? A University of Sussex study for the Global Environmental Change programme scans current environmental education practice in the UK. Researchers asked: Is it enough to expect children to make society's decisions? What other influences count and which teaching and learning approaches best answer today's needs?

Environmental education is recognised as a central platform for raising awareness of environmental problems and changing habits and attitudes among regular citizens. But is it just up to schools – as distinct from the community as a whole – to provide the necessary impetus and information? Findings of the Sussex study suggest that although schools can play a significant role, schooling should form part of a broader strategy. Too much emphasis on environmental education can distract and mislead elders into believing they are exempt from the process, whilst messages tailored for schoolchildren are often daunting and misleading. Researchers analysed surveys of UK schoolchildren’s perceptions about their environment and the role of schools in influencing children’s ability to think about environmental issues. They also explored uses of information technologies in environmental education. Key findings were that:

Policies for environmental education underline the role of schools but pay insufficient heed to social and cultural factors that decide how and why people treat the environment as they do, such as peer pressure, access to finance and the availability of more environmentally friendly ways of working.
Schools cannot do everything, especially given the low priority attached to environmental education.
Children in different parts of the country hold widely differing views on environmental issues.
Young people often feel powerless in the face of the global environmental problems that tend to be emphasised in the media and classroom teaching, rather than everyday dilemmas and choices.
Multimedia technology, including computer games, can play a useful part in helping schoolchildren to make sense of links between local issues and global problems such as climate change.

The study report suggests steps governments can take to fit environmental education more closely to their environmental policy aims, including moves to:

build environmental education into a broader strategy designed to help create a sustainable society
bring about changes in all sectors of society, not just in the education sector or among young people
integrate the efforts of environmental groups, local authorities, national bodies, government departments and the media, so all can share responsibility for moving live debate and action forward
establish life-long environmental education programmes in the form of community partnerships
encourage development and use of urban wildlife areas so people get a feel for local problem-solving
back more inventive use of digital information technologies to help children understand the links between local and global environmental problems.

Source(s):
'Learning to be Green: the future of Environmental Education' by John Parry in Streetwise: Local Groups & Environmental Education, Issue 36 (Vol 9:4) 1999
'Learning to be Green: The Future of Environmental Education' GEC Special Briefing #2 Global Environmental Change Programme 1997

Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council Global Environmental Change Programme (1994-1997)

id21 Research Highlight: 14 April 2000

Further Information:
John Parry
Institute of Education
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RG
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1273 877312
Fax: +44 (0)1273 678568
Contact the contributor: j.parry@sussex.ac.uk

Institute of Education, University of Sussex

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