Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

 

 

This paper will attempt a synoptic view of the nature of our being in the world and the significance of this for how we understand environmental education. It will be claimed that a key question to be addressed is how we inhere in the world and it will be suggested that this occurs through a mutual anticipation of self and world in the context of particular places in which we find ourselves (literally). Such anticipation is both cerebral and bodied, and importantly it is inherently normative. In this sense the view rejects the privileging of standard scientific accounts of the environment in the context of environmental education and seeks an understanding that can rightly be characterized as an ‘attunement’, and that is as much immediate, affective, aesthetic and in a certain sense ‘moral’, as it is discursively intellectual. It will be suggested that this perspective has significant implications for how we should conceive of environmental education, one of which is the need to attend to the character of the student’s day to day participation in the environment of the school. It will be argued that in this respect the culture of the school as a place of learning and living is at least as important to the long term goals of environmental education as anything that the formal curriculum might teach about global ecology and the environment. This in turn will lead to a questioning of some current dominant motives and performance measures that inform many school practices.

 

This is a joint seminar with the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment (CREE)