This booklet deals with environmental education and the potential and the issues related to developing teaching in this field of study.This is the introduction to a booklet containing 5 chapters:Special attention will be given to describing how environmental education has developed in recent years and the significance the changed long term perspective has had, for instance, on the aims, choice of content, the planning of the various activities designed to reflect the content, as well as evaluation of the studies.
In connection with the Danish Bill of Education in 1994 for the Folkschool, the focus was placed on environmental education. The Minister of Education at that time, Ole Vig Jensen, launched a development programme under the auspices of the Nordic Council called MUVIN. Here many new ideas on environmental education were developed and tested in practice by several hundred teachers. The same basic ideas and the experience gained later became the corner stones of a 3-year project in the 4 Green City towns of Videbæk, Herning, Ikast and Silkeborg, in which teams of teachers from practically all the schools in the towns participated.
Experiences and the good results from these development projects have pointed to, among other things, the need for teachers to consider how is it possible in the early planning stages of environmental education:
Such considerations point to the necessity of involving the long-term view of aims and evaluation of environmental education. If the future perspective is not included it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discuss meaningfully and reflect on what can contribute to add quality to the teaching, so environmental education does not have the result mentioned above after each point, and which the development projects have shown contribute less towards developing the pupils’ will and ability to deal with environmental issues i.e. their action competence.to create a study framework that allows the pupils themselves actively to seek relevant information and gain insight into the concrete environmental issue - and not to lecture and inform them on the issue to give the pupils the chance to form their own conception of the issue – and not give them the right attitude to give the pupils the ability and will to involve themselves actively in the environmental issues that they as adults have to be accountable for – not to attribute them the right behaviour towards the issues we have here and now. The booklet will touch on central questions related to environmental education and provide possible evaluation themes connected with them:
What is the over all aim of environmental education?
What are the challenges of future environmental education?
What is the effect of environmental education that focuses on conflicts of interest in the exploitation of the environment rather than studying a polluted lake?
How can environmental education be organised so that it is marked by activity and built on the pupils’ own investigations rather than traditional class teaching?
In what ways can project work support the ideas of contemporary environmental education.?
What elements can be utilised in environmental education that give force to the pupils’ action competence?
The booklet is organised so that the first chapter provides a brief presentation of some of the central issues and ideas tied to contemporary environmental education. Then there are four chapters that in detail go into depth with these issues. Experience from research undertaken on the previously mentioned development projects will be used – including practical examples, concrete ideas, as well as statements from teachers and pupils. Each chapter is concluded with a list of the central evaluation themes.
On the basis of discussions of the examples, the ideas, and the experience, the booklet seeks to inspire the wish to begin developing environmental education adapted to local conditions.
Environmental Education - development and evaluation
by
Finn Mogensen, Ph.D
Research Centre for Environmental and Health Education
The Royal Danish School of Educational Studies
:fm@esbjerg.dlh.dk