Environmental education in action: a discursive approach to curriculum design

Abstract

Why do the designers of environmental education do what they do towards the environment through education? More importantly, how do they account for their design decisions (plans and actions)? Using the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis, we analyse environmental education designers' discourse in terms of the discursive resources—or interpretive repertoires—that they use to (a) make their position, (b) make their talk do work and (c) tell a story about events, situations and who they are (identity). Drawing on observations and interviews from a larger programme concerned with understanding environmentalism and environmental education, we identified five main repertoires: relevance, knowledge transferability and translatability, emotionality, expertise and empiricism. The approach provides us with a more refined characterization of the culture of environmental education curriculum design through the ways designers in the field explain their doings, and we explore the important implications for curriculum design in this field.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. All opinions are those of the authors. The authors also wish to thank Alan Reid and two anonymous reviewers for insightful reviews of prior drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The use of square brackets represent additions to the text and round parentheses represent enclosing transcriber's comments. The use of square brackets in different lines marks the start and end of overlapping speech, and their position is in alignment where the overlap occurs.