Teaching science or cultivating values? Conservation NGOs and environmental education in Costa Rica

Abstract

A key ongoing debate in environmental education practice and its research relates to the content and goals of environmental education programmes. Specifically, there is a long history of debate between advocates of educational perspectives that emphasise the teaching of science concepts and those that seek to more actively link environmental and social issues. In practice, educators and organisations respond to these tensions in a variety of ways, often strongly reflecting the particular social and economic contexts in which they are located. Much of the research in the area, however, has tended to take a narrow focus on either purely theoretical concerns or on individual programmes in schools or protected areas. In contrast, this research used an ethnographic approach to explore debates about the content and aims of educational programmes between diverse educational actors in one community in Costa Rica. The research revealed that environmental education: (i) is an important local site for the active contestation of understandings of the natural world and humans’ relationships to it; and (ii) can be part of wider struggles over the control of processes of local development and environmental management. The study further suggests that while theoretical discussion about the relative merits of diverse approaches to environmental teaching and learning is important, if that analysis is not situated within a particular social, economic and political context, it is likely to reveal relatively little about how or why particular perspectives on environmental education may dominate or remain marginal in a specific place.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• conservation NGOs
• science education
• community development
• politics of education

Notes

1. For a recent analysis of this and other issues in environmental education in Latin America specifically, see González‐Gaudiano (2007).

2. In the following, material taken from these interactions is denoted in one of two styles: direct quotations taken from recorded interview transcripts are placed in inverted commas; paraphrased passages taken from my interview notes are in italics. Although passages in italics do not represent direct quotations, they are true to the intent of the conversation in which they took place. All translations are mine.

3. ‘Grey literature’ refers to materials which are publicly available – for example, technical reports, annual reports, unpublished papers, etc. – but for which production is not controlled by commercial publishers.

4. Names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

5. In ecological terms, the Monteverde area is a tropical montane cloud forest, one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems (see Nadkarni and Wheelwright 2000, 8–9).

6. For a full account of the Reserve’s establishment, see Nadkarni and Wheelwright (2000) and Wallace (1992).

7. Each of these skits reflected broader Costa Rican discourses of peace, non‐violence and conservation which I frequently heard emphasised both within the community and nationally. The piece on war was particularly striking in the context of US military action in Iraq. There was significant disapproval of this within the Costa Rican media as well as in everyday conversation.

8. It is worth noting that the research did not explore learners’ own perspectives and interpretations in depth – an area which would add even further complexity to the picture of local engagements with environmental education (see Rickinson 2001; Dillon 2003).