Blank, blind, bald and bright spots in environmental education research

Introduction

As noted in the editorial for the preceding issue (Reid 2019), by year’s end, Environmental Education Research will have published 25 volumes of studies. In total, they contain over 150 issues and more than a thousand articles, authored by a wide variety of researchers of environmental education and/or sustainability education drawn from around the globe.

Along with other leading journals serving these fields of inquiry, we trust publishing such articles helps sharpen our collective sense of what is worth investigating in environmental and sustainability education, as well as what has been found or concluded. But also more than this: that the studies we publish help develop how we might ground and prioritise what comes to matter in and across the multiple and overlapping worlds of scholarship, policy, practice and theory related to these self-same fields, and beyond.

In this follow-on editorial essay to Reid (2019), I explore how we might achieve this by recapping some of the broad themes that we, as an editorial board and office, will touch on throughout this year in order to commemorate our 25-year publishing milestone. I focus on the core business of the journal, and illustrate its work through examples of a diversity of foci, approaches and insights to inquiry. But before then, a few things must be recognised before they can be held aside. These are the features on the immediate horizon for the editorial office, and include various pragmatic concerns, such as the ways this journal, like many others, has had to keep step with a wide range of shifts in academic publishing over the last quarter of a century. Much of this marks the ongoing transition from an analogue to digital publishing era, but also a ‘product-’ to a ‘services-oriented’ approach to journal-based scholarship, especially with the accompanying rise and profile of social media and digital scholarship. And like other journals too, we face a range of challenges related to capacity in publishing and the increased scrutiny of studies (e.g. questions concerning their authorship, reproducibility and impact, by funders, publishers and users of research), but also how to support the ‘greater goods’ of researcher collaboration, multiple languages, cross-border work, and interdisciplinarity.

Obstacles to some of these outcomes, as well as enablers of particular aspects, must include greater recognition of the agendas of those academics who are institutionally based as much as the role of 'freelance scholars', many of whom now work primarily within an interconnected, digitised environment for scholarship and exchange, where the online sharing of data as much as ideas and publications (and their translation) is rapidly overtaking traditional concerns about establishing the origins, locations, relations and ethics of research and publication.

How editorial offices, boards and publishers evolve their work to address such shifts towards ‘openness’, a ‘service expectation’ and associated new business models for journals remains hard to predict. So too is how they might embrace (or not) a new focus on the availability of data and metadata, and their transparency and ‘shareability’ rather than, say, those of the conventional forces and foci of quality argument and rhetoric in scholarship. Also, whether and how to uphold and/or police publishing ethics and integrity? Ensure authentic diversity of authors, reviewers, and editorial board members? And, how to employ technology to support human decision making (e.g. in transacting much of the work of an editorial office online) …?

These considerations and many more, are becoming increasingly familiar to the gatekeepers of many scholarly outlets, including Environmental Education Research. However, rather than simply alert readers to the trends, pressures and fashions in the ‘business of publishing’, in editorials such as this, I hope we can also shift our attention upstairs as well as down below. In fact, perhaps it is both inwards and outwards too, to opportunities that also encourage further stock-taking and new expectations about the work of this journal, given the fields it does, and might, serve.

So, alongside other guest editorials from board members during Volume 25, through this series of commentaries, challenges and foci for debate, I hope it also doubles up as an invitation to further studies by you and others within and beyond our volumes. But to bring the purpose of this particular contribution to the fore, in what follows, I reflect on some of the enduring, emerging and anticipated features of contributions to the journal 25 years on from its inception, from the perspective of its current editor. This is to ensure there is an explicit context to those initiatives commemorating this milestone, but also to provide possible foci to various grounds and ways forward that identify, illuminate and address some of the blank, blind, bald and bright spots of research we have noted in what has been published to date (Box 1, see also Reid and Scott 2013).

Box 1. Noticing spots in environmental and sustainability education research

• ‘blank spots’ – those topics about which ‘we know enough to question, but not to answer’

• ‘blind spots’ – those topics that we ‘don’t know well enough to even ask about or care about’

• ‘bald spots’ – those topics that are repeatedly pursued in research

• ‘bright spots’ – those topics that inspire and innovate research.

Source: Adapted from Reid and Scott (2013)

Revisiting the mission, aims and scope of Environmental Education Research

To continue, it is perhaps unsurprising that editors advise prospective authors for a scholarly journal to do at least three things: (i) orientate themselves within a disciplined field of study, (ii) check whether this is effectively served by the aims and scope of any journal with which they look to publish and (iii) make clear, as appropriate, whether their contribution is going to address a particular blank, blind, bald or bright spot in research (see also Selwyn 2014).

For Environmental Education Research, the domains of work we consider to be ‘home turf’ for all three considerations have not drastically changed since its early days. This is because authors of most papers can establish in highly specific terms which gap, challenge, issue, or spot in environmental and/or sustainability education they are addressing, particularly in the title, abstract and keywords to their manuscript. It remains important, however, for authors to be clear about these considerations in their covering letter to a submission too, and to appreciate that initial screening of a submission by the editorial office is usually based on these aspects, and thus, remains one of the most crucial points in the publication process. It also serves as a timely reminder for prospective and our contributing authors to reflect on the very terms of a journal, as captured by the words used in its own title, aims and scope, to which we now turn.

I raise this here because Environmental Education Research was founded with an eye to publishing work within and across the possible intersections of its two core substantive referents as fields of study, noting too that these are variously engaged, critiqued and developed by the original research studies the editorial board looks to publish. Those two areas, centring as they do on the educational and the environmental – or environment and education, as John Smyth (1995, 3) put it in the opening paragraphs to the journal’s very first article – also happen to be widely recognisable as standard terms in academic research and scholarship. Nevertheless, they remain open to criticism and development as both umbrella and orientating constructs, and in relation to any particular – but neither fixed nor final – conjoining of the environmental with education (see Reid 2016).

I unpack this further below, but before then, let us revisit the aims and scope of this journal. Apart from a little wordsmithing and the inclusion of sustainability education (to better reflect the evolving work and interests of those in environmental education and environmental education research), since 1995, its core purposes have been expressed as follows:

The mission of Environmental Education Research is to advance research-based and scholarly understandings of environmental and sustainability education. The journal achieves this by publishing peer reviewed research and scholarship on all aspects of environmental education, sourced from around the world and diverse schools of thought and practice in inquiry.

The editorial board welcomes submission of original, high quality and innovative papers derived from empirical, philosophical, practice-or policy-related investigations of environmental and sustainability education. The journal’s primary audiences are those working in or with the broad fields of education and educational research, and environmental studies, and relevant interdisciplinary or subdisciplinary aspects.

Manuscripts should be scholarly, analytical and critical. Ideas discussed and advanced should be transferable to other educational systems and cultures (where possible), and papers should be accessible to an international readership.

[See also Box 2. What do you look for in a paper?]

Box 2. What do you look for in a paper? (Adapted from an interview by Ian White with Alan Reid, 29 November 2010, Centre for Research in Education and the Environment, University of Bath)

There are no ideal or perfect papers to submit. Manuscripts which are submitted are initially screened against the Aims & Scope of the journal, so it’s important that authors address these. A helpful model for thinking about preparing a manuscript is Swales’ (1990) model for Creating A Research Space: consider the kind of literature which is already out there, the kind of niche that you as author want to create, and how that particular paper is going to address that niche (see Storey 2015, for a summary).

One of the main areas of feedback that referees often give is: how does this build on or advance our understanding, particularly given an international audience and literature base for the field? So if a paper is written largely with a national literature set in mind, then Environmental Education Research may not be the best place for that paper, unless it begins to build bridges or make links to some of the wider literature out there.

The Editorial Board and the referees are encouraged to assess whether the manuscript provides something original, adds to the knowledge that we already have, and whether it challenges existing ways of thinking about things in this research field. Within environmental education research, people have drawn on the notion of blind spots and blank spots quite considerably (Gough 2002). There are some blind spots in the way we currently do research, and a glaring blind spot to recognise within most education research is how deeply anthropocentric it is. So we could ask, what mighty an ecocentric perspective offer, for example, to the way we understand a relationship between our knowledge and our behaviour and our attitudes in the company of the more-than-human (Gough 1999)? Does that re-jig anything or everything? Other examples include what people learn from particular experiences in/of ‘nature’, or in relation to ‘the environment’ more broadly conceived, such as through outdoor or experiential learning (Mannion 2019). And that may be particularly important for current, pressing issues to do with how, where and when we learn to understand the climate change debate (Howell and Allen 2019), or learn to understand notions of resilience, where resilience may be ecological but also perhaps psychological and community-based (Lundholm and Plummer 2010).

Cloete’s (2011) paper looks at how the notion of ‘the bush’ is understood in southern Africa. It starts by explaining the history of some of the key terms which are used – words to do with nature and the bush and the kind of discourses within which they come from – and how those present difficulties for the way environmental education is practiced in the region. The analysis emphasises questions to do with colonialism and post-colonialism. But also within southern Africa, and South Africa in particular, Cloete flags the impact that apartheid has had on the kinds of practices which went on there in the past, and whether those might still cast a shadow over how environmental education is done now. So, one of the key things which comes out of that particular paper is illustrating the need to revisit some of the key debates and the key ways of framing our understandings of the core components of the term, environmental education, but in new ways.

As with most journals, it’s also helpful if the author shows some kind of familiarity with what the journal has already published, the kinds of key papers which have come out of the journal, and the kinds of work that people on the Editorial Board are doing or advocating. It is also useful to look at the structures of existing papers and see how those are prepared, and to get a range of views on what counts as good writing in this particular academic field, including how current debates or topics are understood and being advanced within this area. The editorial board is not expecting authors to only cite material which is very recent but rather traces where some of the most significant and relevant ideas come from, and where they might go.

Within any research field and research approach there’s always going to be a question of what kind of quality criteria should be applied to understanding a particular study, so we also invite authors and referees to consider whether for a particular manuscript, it is in terms of: rigour or being systematic, validity and reliability, offering a compelling interpretation or reinterpretation or multiple interpretations of existing data, appropriate levels of detail for someone to independently judge the quality of the work, and, whether this is an exciting and interesting area to be researching at the moment (or whether this is treading old ground).

The website contains Instructions for Authors and also offers templates for prospective authors. We strongly encourage people who want to submit a paper to make use of those. In terms of some of the perennial issues that a journal faces, one of the things that can be a cause of concern for some referees is a poorly prepared manuscript. So we do encourage people to pay special attention to following the recommended advice and guidance for preparing manuscripts for the journal. The quality of expression and clarity of argumentation are common areas of concern for referees. We do encourage authors to use their ‘critical friends’ to help prepare a better manuscript. We stress referees’ feedback is not to be understood as a set of instructions, but often a road map for improving the quality of the paper: its argumentation, expression and contribution to the field. We are aware that many authors have to go through two, three, four rounds of refereeing before the paper is recommended to be accepted for publication.

Since 1995, changes to the main aspects of the work of the editorial office in relation to the aims and scope have been: (a) to provide more advice, guidelines, templates and examples for preparing manuscripts, and (b) to broaden the range of manuscript types accepted for review, as noted in the Instructions for Authors (see https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=ceer20&page=instructions) and Environmental Education Research general guidelines (see http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/ceer-general-guidelines.pdf, which also discusses the work of the editorial office, board members and referees).

As might be expected, the most cited (see https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showMostCitedArticles?journalCode=ceer20) and most read papers (see https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showMostReadArticles?journalCode=ceer20) in the journal have tended to be literature reviews, innovative empirical and theoretical studies, and analyses of key concepts in and approaches to environmental and sustainability education. While as noted in Box 2 and in the commentary to our aims and scope statement online (located on the journal’s homepage): ‘In supporting the mission and aims of the journal, and to contribute to scholarly conversation and debate in this field, the editorial board strongly encourages authors to consult the scholarly literature in this and cognate fields when positioning and advancing arguments.’

Translating the key ideas expressed there into the terms and intent of this editorial, as an enduring feature of its output, Environmental Education Research remains committed to publishing studies that research the scenarios, qualities, features and impacts associated with a range of principles, philosophies, practices and programs of environmental and sustainability education (ESE), through empirical and/or theoretical studies that address some of the blank, blind, bald and/or bright spots in these areas.

Thus, whether ESE takes place in the formal sector – during places for, and experiences of, schooling of various sorts, or in vocational, further, higher or lifelong education – or in fact, through informal or non-formal education – authors may use their manuscripts to test and/or retheorise whether some kind of learning and/or teaching about/for/in/with/through environmental or sustainability matters is/was possible, happens/happened and to what effect or end. Instances or ideas for this may be mediated by ‘educationalists’ and/or ‘educators’ (including those categories more broadly conceived), and/or with others adopting aspects of those roles, such as by close and extended families, friendship groups and gatherings, or via the more-than or other-than human (co)‘teacher/learner’. Less common in these regards are studies from households and leisure settings such as gaming, celebrations and festivals, or during affiliative activities (be those of community action groups, scouting, guiding, and so forth). We do receive studies that take place at sites such as museums, aquariums, zoos, gardens, farms … but there are many other ‘places’ (possibly, outerscapes–innerscapes?) to consider too, which afford some form of structured to non-structured education.

As another general observation, the vast majority of the submissions we receive and that attempt this work are articles based on stand-alone empirical and theoretical research studies (which will be typically argued in 5–7000 words, excluding references and other support material, such as figures, tables and boxes). However, Environmental Education Research also accepts the following manuscript types:

• Scholarly reviews: Extended essays and surveys, e.g. a literature review (typically 10–15,000 words);

• Review essays: on key questions, breakthroughs, developments, events, publications and trends (typically 3–5000 words);

• Review symposia: a group of review essays;

• Research degree summary (with a synopsis, 350 max words).

In addition, the journal offers a review section for books, reports, conferences and publications in other media which advance research-based and scholarly understandings of environmental and sustainability education. In so doing, submissions might also offer:

• Critical commentary on research and developmental activities in environmental education;

• Retrospective analyses of activities in a field;

• Critical commentaries on policy or practice issues;

• Comparative aspects of an environmental education topic or theme.

Much ado about spots?

As the previous editor of the journal, Bill Scott, and I noted in a double special issue of the journal marking the first 10 years of the journal, the kinds of manuscripts and where they come from, did – and continue to – represent studies relevant to a diversity of educational processes, sectors and settings (Reid and Scott 2008). Primarily, and as noted above, given this is a journal for education and the environmental, published papers are predominantly about how those in various brackets within ‘K-12’ through to higher education and lifelong learning contexts, and how educational activities thereof grapple with a wide range of environmental and sustainability matters, to varying extents.

But the volumes of the journal also include papers drawn from other sectors, including from those who have an interest in the scope and value of using, applying and reworking educational research approaches, traditions and insights, e.g. in tourism and business, or planning and conservation, as well as in other institutional to non-institutionalised settings and processes. In fact, another of the ‘lacks’ most obvious in some of the submissions received is, how to make better use of institutional forms of analysis, such as on the processes of institutionalisation and/or de-institutionalisation of particular aspects of that which is studied, whether that be the ‘educational, environmental and/or sustainable’.

A pertinent example takes us back to when the journal started, in the mid-1990s. Talk of the Paris Agreement on global warming and climate disruption, and the possibilities of voluntary, let alone mandatory, climate change education policy and practice, were typically far from the minds and interests of many researchers of environmental education, particularly if judged by the number, range and quality of submissions received on those topics. But as interest in our virtual special issue on climate change education and research in 2017 has shown (including its launch at COP23 in Bonn, 2017), or the pre-publication papers on this gathered together in a collection in the current volume also shows, this particular intersection between educational research and environmental research or sustainability-related research is growing in importance, complexity and attention. For the editorial office, this also includes as a source and focus of manuscript submissions, and as a key segment to the audience for what gets published, especially those seeking evidence-based ‘advice’ on what to do, and not do about climate change in education. Indeed, as board member Martha Monroe’s work shows (Monroe et al. 2019), there are many interested in working across sectors, and looking at the impact of education-related work in applied contexts too, such as extension and communication. Key questions here are the effectiveness of educational strategies which are impelled or enacted therein, and then, how those might be understood, taken up, redeveloped or critiqued by others, or in and across other settings (Monroe, 2019).

Another feature of the journal mentioned above is that it has occasionally carried papers on conferences: reviewing events and provided retrospective analysis of the kinds of things which have been going on at – and emerged from – different research meetings or networks related to environmental and sustainability education. These include via collections and special issues, as well as reviews of events such as the World Environmental Education Congress (Lotz‐Sisitka 2009; Breiting 2009), and the North American Association for Environmental Education’s research symposium (Meyers et al. 2007). A key expectation of the editorial office here has been ensuring such manuscripts are more than descriptive or anecdotal: they should provide critical scholarly commentary on the kind, quality and focus of research networking at that time (and/or over time), as well as those of the research and development work which has gone on there (e.g. in comparison to elsewhere), or has become the focus of debate at their meetings (see Öhman 2016).

Unfortunately, these kinds of papers are few and far between. A notable gap in the papers in Environmental Education Research, is reflections on the work of the American Educational Research Association and its longstanding Environmental Education Special Interest Group, in comparison to the more recently formed, Network 30 (NW30) on Environmental and Sustainability Education Research of the European Education Research Association (both of which the journal has sponsored at various times). Indeed, if a healthy community of researchers is to show evidence that it regularly thinks about and discusses the knowledge it produces and for whom, surely greater attention has to be paid to how it goes about doing both, particularly if recognition of the full range of research and research-related activities isn’t going to be undermined by focusing publishing activities only on basic or applied research (OECD 1994)? Foci for analytical writing about such events might include: how inclusive and/or exclusive are processes and participation in establishing to promoting event foci and associated calls for papers; key features to aspects of the refereeing, presenting and sharing of submissions, presentations and proceedings; the kinds of, and priority given to, particular topic areas that event convenors, keynotes and presenters address; and the range of perspectives which are brought to bear on a particular matter, such as in invited topics, via research symposia, and/or in the times and space(s) given to debate and reflection at or after such events (see Hart et al. 2004).

In fact, as many of the papers prepared for submission to a research journal arise from initial presentations and discussions at such research events, research journals remain an obvious place to encourage reflection, dialogue and debate about key issues in the practices and trends of research development. They might even promote particular debates or perspectives on these by drawing in other contributions and contributors, such as through guest-edited special issues or mini collections (again, see Öhman 2016, and Reid 2013). More broadly, whether these special issues tackle regional, topical, epistemological, methodological and/or ontological considerations, a guiding principle for all guest editors is establishing and probing the value and values of doing and presenting such research to an international audience – for example, by reflecting on who benefits from doing such research, and what difference it makes, near and far (e.g., Thiemann, de Carvalho, and de Oliveira 2018).

The journal also has a history of welcoming papers which are grounded in critical discussion in and around such issues (Russell 2006; Jickling 2009; McKenzie 2009; Hart 2005). We note too that these authors, be they as board members or other contributors to the journal past and present, remain active in contributing to and shaping other publications beyond these pages too: be that in editing journals in this field (as noted in footnote 1) or in collections such as the International Handbook of Research in Environmental Education (Stevenson et al. 2013). Their work amongst that of many others is also represented in reference works such as Environmental Education: Critical Concepts in the Environment (Reid and Dillon 2016a), while as a general comment, their work invites others to continue and develop new conversations, such as by acting as series editors for a range of academic publishers of emerging and established examples of research on environmental and sustainability education (these series are listed at eerjournal.wordpress.com).

In this, I note that occasional chief editor, Justin Dillon, and I (Reid and Dillon 2016c) have shown that when the field was forming internationally in the 1970s, there was a strong emphasis on attending to the role of systems in this field, be they socio-cultural, philosophical, educational, geographical, biological, and much more. Histories of the field also show interests in all sorts of intersections these systems have too, within society, and in different networks and systems working together. Unsurprisingly, attention to interdisciplinary insights, as well as multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, have featured in articles throughout the history of the journal (recent examples include: Bursztyn and Drummond 2014; Nordén 2018; Block, Goeminne, and Van Poeck 2018).

Research with impact?

But how else might we unpack and qualify these initial observations further? One route is via the proxy for impact produced within the metrics for scholarly journals, such as in our most recent Impact Factor. A score of 2.595 for Environmental Education Research can be found in listings for both Education & Educational Research (producing a ranking of 26/238, i.e. (Q1), and Environmental Studies (a ranking of 38/108, i.e. (Q2). This particular Impact Factor is calculated for those journals indexed and evaluated in the Journal Citation Report (JCR), based on the number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. Both entries are found within the listings of the Social Sciences Citation Index, while we might also note that some submissions to and publications within the journal address aspects usually found in the Sciences Citation Index, in particular, Environmental Sciences, as this remains a closely related area on the environmental side of the scholarship that the journal and readers are interested in (e.g. the papers on ecological resilience in volume 16 – see Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer (2010), and more recently, those on climate change, e.g. Sezen-Barrie, Shea, and Borman 2019).

However, to expand on the differences in relative weighting and the significance of both rankings for notions of identifying ‘blank, blind, bald and bright spots’ in the argumentation, literature bases and citations of the journal’s articles, readers can note that there are other disciplinary and field-related citation ‘industry categories’ drawn upon in keywords in particular, and these are typically those associated with studies that would be usually grouped by JCR as: ‘green & sustainable science & technology’, ‘environmental health’, ‘sociology’, ‘multidisciplinary psychology’ and ‘interdisciplinary social sciences’ (this includes manuscripts that are rejected by the editor).

Perhaps counter-intuitively, those less frequently or commonly mentioned in those which are accepted (as shown by a check of the citations for each volume, or cumulatively), are papers that draw on or speak to wider work in leading peer-reviewed journals and other high-quality scholarly material. These would those most typically associated with: ‘geography’, ‘political science’, ‘anthropology’, ‘communication’, ‘educational psychology’, ‘leisure and tourism’, ‘cultural studies’, ‘social issues’, ‘urban studies’, ‘women’s studies’ and ‘history of social sciences’ (even if these are dear to the biographies, interests and imaginations of the researchers who publish with us, or are board members.¹)

So in surfacing this, might we will also see more use, engagement with, and critique of such research appearing in these other areas, and their scholarly journals too? Even though it is now ten years on from its initial publication, how to achieve that may require a more concerted response to Scott’s (2009) challenge to environmental education researchers 30 years after Tbilisi, worth re-quoting here in full:

Perhaps our next grant application as researchers needs to be with someone from outside our usual frame of reference, whether this is from another adjectival education, or someone from the educational mainstream, or from a different discipline altogether. At a time of greater recognition that interdisciplinary research is needed, this would seem sound anyway, and this links with the point I made earlier about the need for a combination of methodological approaches. This is surely the time for something different, and for a bit of risk. (Scott 2009, 160)

To return to the subject of core categories though, and especially for when it comes to manuscript screening and refereeing, it remains the case that authorial claims as to those theories, findings and breakthroughs mainly related to education and educational research, but also in environmental studies, will be those which are initially assessed for areas of possible contribution to the field via this journal. In more detail, as with many journals, the editorial office’s task at this point is to check whether there is an ‘obvious’ or ‘natural’ fit with the work we have published and seek to publish, including for developing the work represented in this journal, before a submission can proceed to refereeing. Yet, as with footnote 1, it is clear that there are always gaps in the possible ‘scholarly conversations’ and debates (see Reid 2013; Sutoris 2019) that could be had, across key constructs, research (sub)domains, methodologies and forms of activity. And in line with the preceding argument, this includes via citations and critiques that we don’t necessarily see in many of the journal’s published articles (yet?) of companion (or competing) fields of inquiry, especially in an initial submission (as opposed to a resubmission or revised version, where this might be addressed).

To elaborate further, the profiles used by JCR are quite broad but they give some flavour to the ‘official’ remit of each core category:

Education & Educational Research covers resources on the full spectrum of education, from theoretical to applied, from nursery school to Ph.D. Included in this category are resources on pedagogy and methodology as well as on the history of education, reading, curriculum studies, education policy, and the sociology and economics of education, as well as the use of computers in the classroom.

While:

Environmental Studies covers resources that are multidisciplinary in nature. These include environmental policy, regional science, planning and law, management of natural resources, energy policy, and environmental psychology.

Thus, on the one hand, readers of this journal may note that in the many relatively small-scale and modestly scoped studies published in our pages, there are those whose literature review and research designs draw on aspects of environmental psychology to probe, say, the conceptions and attitudes of a cohort of students or teachers towards environment-related concepts, and in so doing, create an intersection relevant to the aims and scope of this journal. Yet on the other, a typical gap in such submissions (and publications) belies a lack of manuscripts that draw on advances in studies of education, or in this case, educational psychology and reviews of educational research more broadly. Thus, for this particular example, it may be to draw on literature in leading and progressive education and educational research journals, to establish (and test further) emerging models of students’ epistemic beliefs, epistemic emotions, learning strategies and outcomes, such as in relation to climate change. These may include studies not necessarily developed from the outset by their authors with the fields of environmental or sustainability education in mind, but which still cast a wide and attractive gambit, seeking to transform educational practices in this regard more broadly (see, for example, Muis et al. 2015).

Other gaps related to conceptual sources, studies and research citations can be inferred from aggregates of arguments and inspections of literature bases that prospective and published authors do, or do not, habitually engage. For Education and Educational Research, an obvious blank spot alluded to above may include making greater use of the work, insights and trends reported in such leading journals as: Learning and Instruction, Metacognition and Learning, Studies in Science Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Learning Media and Technology, Sociology of Education, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Studies in Higher Education, Journal of Educational Policy, Urban Education, Discourse, Compare, and so forth, as appropriate (for these and other possibilities, see https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=3304).

In contrast, for Environmental Studies, the editorial office is seeing an increasing number of submissions drawing on key scholarly journals such as Nature Climate Change, and Climate Change, to strengthen studies of climate change education and communication, for example. Other high impact journals that authors now draw on more frequently are: Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Conservation Biology, Journal of Environmental Psychology and Environment and Behaviour, particularly in scoping topics usually related to individual perceptions and conceptions, and for studies of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours.

But again, gaps and the various spots here (depending on your point of view?), are arguably those concerning whether, as a field, or as members of a community of scholars, researchers are routinely engaging themes and studies more typically attributed to those found in a wider cloud of journals, such as Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, Environmental Health Perspectives, Land Degradation & Development, Water Research, Journal of Environmental Management, Environmental Research Letters, and Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. While to flip a typical ordering of the STEM-HASS binary², and thus create another perspective that invites prospective authors to look beyond those journals and outlets usually associated with the environmental social sciences, there is the spike in interest raised by the curious work of ‘new materialisms’ (Mcphie and Clarke 2019). Whether one accepts or rejects the tenets of such work is not for this editorial, but the bubble of activity here serves to illustrate an increasing interest in engaging studies in journals and other scholarly outlets that speak to the environmental arts and humanities, and related fields more broadly (e.g. environmental ethics and philosophy). And last but not least, there are, of course, interests expressed in submissions that draw heavily on research theory, methodology and methods too, whether that be principally to underpin or redirect such work, e.g. towards the post-qualitative?³

Now, it is relatively easy to observe there are some scholars of ESE who do engage these and related sources; but my point here is unlike the core categories for the journal, a working familiarity with multiple dimensions and with debates beyond one’s immediate specialism in relation to what is raised by such provocations as the JCR profiles and their subdomains, is far from ubiquitous amongst the international research community, including that represented by referees and board members. It can even be argued to be doubly so too: particularly in relation to some of the core references and debates that have happened in ESE down the years (see, e.g. Reid and Dillon 2016c). As Justin Dillon and I have argued (Reid and Dillon 2016d), one way of highlighting this is to see the major work of scholarship as that of ensuring quality and outcomes in the connecting of environment and education through inquiries in this area, whilst also recognising that there will be many ways to achieve this.

One that is particularly well suited to a research journal is to expect authors to review claims and possibilities as to any purported connection (or disconnection) of environment and education, alongside the shapes and shaping that have and might reasonably occur as ‘environmental education’ within and across particular contexts as a result of that (Reid and Dillon 2016c). Another, is to engage the fact that there are stark-to-subtle changes to patterns in thought and practice in ESE (such as in relation to traditions that embrace or eschew particular forms, interpretations or priorities for sustainable development, including the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals); while as with the journals noted above, a wide range of scholarly sources and diverse powers claimed or offered by particular currents and correctives to the field. Such currents and correctives serve to establish, reinforce or challenge particular principles and priorities of environmental and sustainability education, be that in terms of its educational or environmental aspects, or the conjoining thereof, such as in advocating for critical pedagogies of place (Hung 2017). Further considerations include the kinds of experience that are gained or challenged – or need challenging – as, during or through instances and sequences of environmental and sustainability education, including over a lifespan and in and across community. And, of course, how (else) environmental and sustainability education may be researched, assessed or evaluated; as well as the key questions and implications that are raised by all this, for core educational concerns such as curriculum and pedagogy (including in relation to liberal, critical and place-based considerations).

Readers will also recognise aspects of this have all been said before, by many, and in many ways. In fact, key aspects were well illustrated in the aforementioned first paper in this very journal. In the abstract to John Smyth’s (1995, 3) overview of the field, he stated his work was:

… an attempt to review the state of environmental education from the viewpoint of one involved in international and national strategies for its development. It relates environment and education to the whole system of human‐environment relationships and sees environmental education not as a separable package but as a movement for fundamental educational reform, in a rapidly changing world under increasing stress both from human‐induced change and from human nature itself. Environmental education has grown through the promotion of innovative educational approaches and the increasing attention given to human aspects of the system. Some of these, notably the idea of sustainability, need further development and careful use. Much work is needed to bring environmental and social systems together into a single conceptual structure, and to keep the development clear of misconceptions which are none of its making, to tackle the global issues that challenge survival and yet to remain realistic and practicable within the system in which it must work.

Starting his paper with the subheading, Environment and Education, Smyth then opened the main body of his article with a sardonic trope, drawing on a conventional start to a fairy tale. He introduces our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their essential priorities for and processes of their learning as follows: ‘Once upon a time there was no difficulty about environmental education. … Competence as an individual, as a member of a society, and as a dependent part of an ecological system were the ultimate objectives of learning, and success was measured by survival’ (p. 3). By the end of his analysis, he was equally sharp in his argumentation, concluding (p. 18):

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that many have reached, that education should be largely recast. … we know that rapid change in a system produces stress, and that a stressed system is vulnerable to opportunists with very different agendas, hence the earlier use of the word ‘circumspectly’. We also know how incredibly adaptable humankind can be, and how quickly an idea can catch on when its time has come. Careful judgement will be needed, and the longer it is delayed the more difficult will it be to make real progress.

In something of a crisp nutshell then, Smyth shows the value of bringing environment, education and research together, whilst also flagging the need to avoid being rushed into any false promises of progress and solution. Indeed, Smyth is not the first to recognise the considerable demand placed on education systems to ensure it is not unresearched either (see examples summarised in Reid and Dillon 2016b), even as these systems have to adjust to the magnitude of these times, and the fateful horizons many suspect or know are already in train, from research and other sources (e.g., Stevenson 1987, 2007).

On face value

Another way of symbolising the need to recognise such overlapping interests is our attempt at the editorial office to create a logo for the journal, as found on the cover of the 25th volume. Taking the form of an inverted trefoil, the logo can be interpreted as offering one loop for each word in the journal’s title, and suggesting both a continuous and dynamic line and field even as it illustrates their differentiation. Yet each loop helps hold the other’s distinctiveness, in balance and interconnectedness, while as a whole it might be used to probe what each manuscript brings to the journal’s distinct areas of focus and contribution? Of course, differing degrees or locations of overlap in a manuscript invite reflection as to how well submissions marry up with what we hope to capture via the journal’s aims and scope. So as with Smyth’s (1995) work, populating and engaging the midzone is probably what we hope the journal can encourage authors to do (best). While to fold in arguments rehearsed previously in Reid and Dillon (2016c), the journal’s volumes and major contributions might also illustrate how to research claims about the environmental and education, if not their intersections and the flows of education, environment and research. As found in many of our ‘reject’ decision letters, this is instead of offering an inquiry and/or scholarship primarily on one of the words, or as if they could be reductively treated as in isolation from the others.

Conclusions

Some scholars have talked about ‘working the hyphen’ in research, and members and initiatives of the editorial board of the journal have tried to encourage that in various ways (e.g., McKenzie 2005). Tilly (2008) raised a similar but wider point during his reflections on the value and use of social theory in research and practice development, inviting researchers to write both about the substantive area they are researching but also what’s an appropriate or fit for purpose method for researching that, understanding it, and advancing one’s own and others’ knowledge around that. Thus, if we take approaches like action research as an example that is not used quite as often as it used to be in this field, we should still note there have been strong arguments offered in this journal’s articles that people (researchers and educators) should research topics in ways which are democratic, open, ethical, and involve people rather than do research simply ‘on’ others (Posch 1996).

As with many other research fields, this is also another way of recognising that there will always be fashions and trends, and fads of interest in inquiry. Some of these speak to transient concerns, others to compelling and perennial issues which members of the field have to address - but not all (Ferreira 2009). In environmental education research, we can note frequent returns are often made to questions of curriculum, professional development for teachers, the role of learner’s experience and its assessment, the merits of outdoors and indoors education for ESE, and so on – and arguably, these and many other areas speak to common questions that educators and stakeholders in education might have about environmental or/and sustainability education, but also ones which are inevitably ‘specialist’ or ‘bespoke’ and largely of interest only to members of a particular field (Reid and Scott 2013). Yet as noted earlier on, interdisciplinarity is increasingly important: not just at the level of the theoretical frameworks that people use, or in the concepts with which they’re working, but also in terms of drawing together different research approaches and insights to create new ones and address research questions that matter. For Environmental Education Research, that includes trying to do so in ways that are mindful of the value (and limitations) of the social sciences (and other disciplines), so that the journal is in a position to publish exemplars of the best of such work when it becomes available (e.g., Russell 2017).

To bring this essay to a close, by publishing articles that provide insights into policies, philosophies, practices and their intersections from different parts of the world, a strong emphasis of this journal is that we can and must learn with and from others, for the kinds of work to which we are committed, and for what we hope are its rightful outcomes. That means, not just simply reporting, advocating or evaluating existing work, but critically researching different approaches, trends, and ways of doing environmental and sustainability education. And given this is a research journal, thinking about them in public with scholarly inputs, voices and traditions from around the world – to maintain the lifeblood of Environmental Education Research.

When asked at journal board meetings and by prospective authors, the key thing that I say I want to ensure while editor is, that the journal remains at the cutting edge of research in and around environmental and sustainability education, and pushes this cutting edge. It can do both best by drawing on significant insights from other areas of leading scholarship, as well as offering up its own. In other words, I hold that this journal has a very important role to play in both supporting, challenging and developing new ways of understanding and prosecuting ‘education and educational research’, and ‘environmental studies’, broadly conceived, including via their various intersections as represented by diverse practices of environmental and sustainability education (and their alternatives!), at local, national, regional and international levels.

So submissions to the journal do well to include argumentation that draws on relevant scholarship from the field and other discipline(s) to investigate the intersection of education and the environment or sustainability from a research perspective (established, emerging and novel). While for the editorial office and board, it is our responsibility to consider if such a manuscript should be considered for publication in this journal, recommend that further work is required before proceeding, or perhaps refer the author to some other outlet or format.

In reaching 25 years of publication then, and as the current editor, my personal hopes can be crystallised as two-fold: (i) that we continue to publish high-quality papers which are innovative, rigorous, and that challenge and stretch the field, and (ii) that the journal is a vehicle known for fostering and extending scholarly collegiality and diversity within and beyond the field. It remains the case that the content of any journal is only as good as its authors, so we will also continue to encourage the current generation and a new range of authors to contribute, particularly those who can work well across the intersections noted above. While in restating the aims and scope of the journal in this editorial, and by providing illustrations of various formats and contributions, alongside suggestions for where to go for ‘inspiration’, I close with what I must trust will emerge. That the editorial board and office will continue to serve the needs of both a new and a diverse(r) range of scholars through the types of work and formats that we can publish, as we also broaden and deepen our collective research of environmental and sustainability education.

Postscript

The cover image used on Volume 25 of Environmental Education Research was chosen to evoke memories of certain poems (most notably, ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ by Robert Hass, ‘For the Children’ by Gary Snyder, and ‘The Peace of Wild Things’, by Wendell Berry. These illuminated meditative moments during what might be better termed, shinrin-yoku (森林浴) [‘forest bathing’], at Muir Woods and throughout the Big Sur, California, during a sabbatical in 2017.

Alan Reid
Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2954-6424

Notes

Notes

1 As well as studies in its immediate peer group, focused as these usually are on national, regional or international studies of environmental and sustainability education (e.g. known by their acronyms as: JEE, AEEC, CJEE, IRGEE, SAJEE, JESD, AJEE, CJEE, JJEE, JSE, …) other studies in the ranked journals list in our paper citations and references (if not sometimes by allusion) include to: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Sustainability, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Local Environment, Journal of Social Issues, Youth & Society, Critical Social Policy, Death Studies, Political Geography, Global Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Politics, Policy Studies Journal, Social Movement Studies, Policy and Society, Qualitative Research, Field Methods, Critical Inquiry, European Journal of Social Theory, Anthrozoos, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Media Culture & Society, Theory Culture & Society, Human Ecology, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Environmental Communication, Children’s Geographies, Gender Place and Culture, Learning and Individual Differences, Studies in Educational Evaluation (in JCR, English language only).

2 For example, STEM as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics/Medicine; and HASS as Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

3 For example, Q1 journals include: Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Sociological Methods and Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, Qualitative Research, International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, Applied Psychological Measurement, and Theory, Culture and Society.