Homework and fieldwork: investigations into the rhetoric–reality gap in environmental education research and pedagogy

Abstract

For years, environmental educators have been arguing that the culture of schooling (mostly focused on cultural reproduction) is antithetical to environmental education. Within this context, it is often suggested that environmental education occurs when there is a particularly passionate and motivated teacher who, despite frequent barriers, maintains environmental education as a priority. Yet the author’s doctoral research suggests that even strong beliefs, significant skills, and an ideal program structure do not lead to the implementation of effective environmental education. Drawing on narrative inquiry, arts‐based research and poststructural analysis, this study examines ways in which the privileging of the intellect in research and pedagogy may be making effective environmental education almost impossible.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Faculties of Education, and Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Notes

1. Schweisfurth (2006), abstract.

2. Ibid.

3. The ways in which human dominance has been created and maintained through discourses of human intellectual superiority have been well documented, and many have spoken about the privileging of cognitive knowing producing a socially constructed divide between humans and non‐human others (e.g. Evernden, 1985/1993 ; Plumwood, 1993; Abram, 1996; Bowers, 1997; O’Sullivan, 1999; Battiste & Henderson, 2000).

4. In the midst of no adequate words with which to reference the organic, mineral and other bodies with which I share my existence, I find the word ‘Land’ a helpful term to use.

5. My questions were prompted by a self‐study essay Jeff wrote the previous summer where he talked about loneliness vis‐à‐vis school hiking trips.

6. Jeff offered two possibilities in response to this analysis. The first was that it made a lot of sense to him, and could be actually what was happening. The other was that this shift was simply an instance of his tendency to go off in many different directions in the context of conversation.

7. I am in no way assuming that my experience is the same as Jeff’s. Yet as this article suggests, our two intertwined stories did have some resonance with each other.

8. I acknowledge the irony that in much of this text, I reinscribe that which I criticize: the privileging of the intellect. Limitations of the possible forms of representation (i.e. the academic journal), together with the rules of legitimacy of research and the power of discourses with which I am inscribed create what feels, at least at the moment, like an inescapable paradox.

9. See Richardson (2002) and Lipsett (2001) for discussions of the struggle to make space for, and hold on to, creative or intuitive ways of knowing when one has been trained to privilege the intellect.