Tbilisi’s “Sounds Of Silence”—(In)action in the policy ≠ embodiments of environmental education

Abstract

Based in the 1977 Tbilisi formalization of Environmental Education (EE), this memory-work study of contemporary silences in Environmental Education Research (EER) emphasizes an embodied∼materialist theorization and activist conception of ecological experience in EE (eco)pedagogy. Relevant empirical-conceptual research drawn from EER Special Issues (SI) provides an evidence-base for re-storying numerous post-Tbilisi silences. Of central importance in critiquing various policy transitions in EE and frequent theory turns in EER are the enigmatically ‘lived’ practices of educative experience (human-culture actions and felt other-than-human-Nature interactions). Ecological experiences within experiential and interdisciplinary EE curriculum are inadequately researched in relation to action. Forty-five years after Tbilisi, the power and promise of its “Recommendations” are re-sounded. Tbilisi’s potentials to reconstruct mainstream education policy have been muted for the past two decades of EER. Evidence-driven critical histories of the praxis of key Tbilisi principles are needed if the narrative continuity of the field is to be radically reclaimed.

Keywords:

• activist conception
• body
• critical history
• ecopedagogy
• experience
• praxis
• special issues
• stratified inquiry
• Tbilisi

Notes

1 I do not revisit the controversial name change from “Nature Study” and “Conservation Education” to “Environmental Education” (Tanner, 1974). Nor do I replay the three United Nations Conferences (Stockholm, 1972, Belgrade, 1975, Tbilisi, 1977) that formalized EE (see Fensham, 1978). I will not add to the numerous conceptual critiques of the “Language of Sustainability” (Gough, 2001), rooted in yet another deconstructive/destructive name-change to (education for) “sustainable development” (ESD) via the Brundtland Report (1987). Nor do I describe the latest mea culpa “correction” of ESD to “ecologically sustainable education.” I do not engage the status of Nature, but emphatically reject the notion of “post” Nature (Payne, 2016, p. 175). Fifth, I only reference the globalized accelerating technocentric/posthuman means of neo-colonial knowledge productions, digitalized modes of post-intellectual exchange, and platforming of instrumentalized “relations” in the neo-liberal, corporate university (for example, Payne, 2003/2006, 2020). I ignore persistent allegations about the “failure” of EE because of the myriad historical, cultural, political, economic, technological, structural, institutional, organizational, and linguistic forces that jeopardize any reasonable assessment, or comparative evaluation, of an international policy formulation, such as Tbilisi. These allegations mirror the chronic problem in EE of the well documented “limits to science communication” (for example, Ward, 2021). Indeed, Ian Robottom’s (2005) (see also Robottom & Hart, 1993) counter-critique of these allegations is consistent with what follows where, experimentally, reversal thinking is used. Finally, due to the sheer volume of published literature in EER, my efforts to resing and restory Tbilisi draw almost exclusively on journal Special Issues (SI) that use empirical research and conceptually developed studies of EE as “historically” bodied knowledge and “materially” embedded narrative “assembled” in, of, and for EER. Apologies to the authors of numerous “single” studies that might praxically, empirically and conceptually add to the evidence base of the activist conception of ecological experience/agency in EE and EER pursued here.

2 The decade-long fracturing of EE starting in the 1990s cannot be underestimated in terms of the field’s ongoing credibility, value (practical) and utility (action) when seen in the historical context of its narrative continuity, discontinuity, convergences and divergences. Notwithstanding, other tensions (Figure 1), this study of ecological experience in the aftermath of Tbilisi is less concerned about policy debates because, invariably in EER, the ebbs and flows of policy shift, turns, transitions, transpositions done in the absence of solid empirical evidence or insight driving the discursive shift and its textual turn. Abstracted, generalized and universalizing policy languages and rhetoric effectively silence practices/grounds and mundane realities (for example, Payne, 2019, 2020, 2021).

3 The “environmental crisis” of the 1970s is inextricably linked to the longer standing “crisis in education” (Arendt, 1954). Despite the best efforts over the past 100 years of the education progressives, reconstructionists and critical theorists, via John Dewey, George Counts, Theodor Brameld, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Joseph Schwab, Basil Bernstein, Jean Anyon, Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, and Stephen Kemmis, to name a few, education discourses, and increasingly, EE and EER, are now firmly entangled in the mainstream fusion and power of Northern academic capitalism, neo-liberal forces and technocentric imperatives (Payne, 2003/2006).

4 To be very sure, for many reasons, I am unable to write on behalf of environmental educators and researchers from the so-called “global south.” Or partially represent those geo-epistemological locations and locales of knowledge (for example, Canaparo, 2009). To partially rectify that northern, methodologically individualist whitism, please refer to the pluralism of ontological, axiological, epistemological, and methodological “matters” raised in a recently published SI in The Journal of Environmental Education, guest edited by Cae Rodrigues (2020). And for a closely related Indigenous Women/Country critique of hegemonic/colonizing white feminism research (in Australia), see Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000/2020).

5 The term “agency” is absent from Tbilisi noting sociologists at that time were developing comprehensive theorizations and stratified approaches to inquiry of habitus (Bourdieu, 1980), the duality of structure and agency (Giddens, 1984), and culture, structure and agency (Archer, 1988). Later, in regard to agency, Archer (2000) highlighted the “primacy of practice” and the “practical order” as pivotal within critical realist approaches to inquiry.

6 Historically (for example, Apple, 1982, Popkewitz, 1991), deductively-driven policy formulations and theory development in education, and their assumed “reform,” “change” or “transformation” of practices, are problematic for reasons too numerous to list here. “Trickle-down” logics encounter numerous limits and constraints. At best, their uptake can be partial only. Within EER, Bob Stevenson has relentlessly tracked “contradictions” in schooling and EE (1987), revisited twenty-years later in another journal SI (2007), and highlighted numerous “tensions and pretensions” in policies (2013). Payne’s (2003/2006, 2020) “technics of experience” in EER highlights the nexus of the digitalized accelerations and hyper individualization of mediated “experience” in the “post” of the postmodern knowledge condition (Lyotard, 1979/1984) of the “field.”

7 Here is neither the space or time to even outline the interrelated problems of access to the phenomena under investigation and interpretation and its/their correlation to representation and legitimation, be it via language, numbers, art…. My method leans, at best, to an approximation of that relation, an enigmatic form of textual correspondence.

8 Dewey cautioned, “educational plans and projects…are at the mercy of every intellectual breeze that happens to blow” (Dewey, 1938a, p. 31). With the advent of “postmodernism” in Education, Usher and Edwards (1994) asserted that the relationship of the postmodern and experiential learning was undertheorized. They asserted the post “cultivation of desire,” following modernity’s preoccupation with reason and autonomy targeted the conspicuous consumption of mostly market-based “wants.” Experiential learning, they argued, was fast becoming a “space” where the assumptions, values, and strategies of the “new right” (later neoliberalism) would dominate mainly middle-class “commonsense.” Usher & Edwards concluded experiential learning was fast becoming a central “object” in a powerful and oppressive discourse.

9 For a comprehensive critique in EER, see Scott (2002), reiterating the practice/s-theory/ies “gap” remains a chronic problem.

10 Children’s Geographies is a vast body of important knowledge about children’s experiences of a wide range of environmental issues and events. Gill Valentine’s corpus of research is another key source that speaks directly and indirectly to theorizing how children and youth engage in particular social and environmental issues. The wide scope of these sources, plus others, lies outside the limits of resounding Tbilisi. The emergence of conceptual-empirical studies of forest, nature, and bush schools in early-years educations in Scandinavia, UK, parts of Europe, and, more recently, Australia, Canada, and the USA is promising for the ongoing purposes here.

11 The first pilot seminar was initiated in Denmark in 1994. The 1997 SI included a detailed report of the second Invitational Seminar (Australia, 1995) and third (UK, 1996). The fifth Seminar was held in Denmark and was mainly devoted to progress in AC with forty researchers from 14 countries participating (Jensen et al., 2000). Narrative continuity of EER and coherence around the critical project were well on display in these Seminars.

12 At about the same time in Europe, the “ecologizing of schools” for “active learning” movement was being pioneered on a broad scale in the “Environment and Schools Initiatives” (ENSI) project (for example, Posch, 1996). Posch clearly focusses on the Tbilisi imperatives of experience (as a generalized conception of learning), interdisciplinarity (from the perspective of curriculum), and responsible decision making, but does not mention “action” (such as AC) or praxis (socially critical EE for the environment), or even activism (SLE).

13 For example, reiterating Rickinson’s study of environmental learning, Barratt Hacking et al. (2007, p. 234) list a number of features of children’s experiences of localized learning found in a large-scale study in UK of “Listening (again!) to Children.” To be clear, that important empirical-conceptual study targeted the need to rethink professional development and not the SLE, AC, PAR agencies, even ecopedagogical activism, highlighted here.