In recent years, there has been a growing global movement towards sustainable development (defined in the Brundtland report Our Common Future as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987)). Indeed, the Brundtland report, along with the revised World Conservation Strategy (IUCN 1990) and Agenda 21 (UNCED 1992) all place high expectations on environmental education as a key means of achieving sustainability. Changes for sustainability will affect individual lifestyles, and attitudes to, and relationships with nature, and education is a critical part of turning the idea of sustainable development into reality (Slocombe & van Bers 1991, p. 12). In arguing that our children should be educated for sustainable development, we must evaluate the arguments about sustainability and see what role environmental education has to play.

Jickling (1992, pp. 6-7) claims that various attempts to analyse the meaning of the term sustainable development have resulted in a ‘conceptual muddle’ which precludes the possibility of accepting any educational prescription for it. However, in drawing this conclusion, he appears to have neglected the alternative conceptions of sustainable development that have been proposed (Fien & Trainer 1993a, p. 14) and the values basis underlying them and, thereby, has not provided a critical direction for a pathway to sustainability.

In attempting to review the recent progress and outline a few of the remaining problems in environmental education it is important, but also because of the scope of the task extremely difficult, to find a suitable structure that will provide some continuity. I have elected therefore to comment firstly on the fundamental issue of philosophy, of what we mean by environmental education and what we acknowledge as practical examples; secondly to discuss a few prominent issues of teaching and learning in four different spheres of education: primary and secondary schools, higher education (universities and colleges of advanced education), technical and further education (TAFE), and non-formal education; and lastly to comment on two general issues in environmental education that relate to the entire field, the first to participation and the need to identify and make suitable provision for those sections of the community who have as yet had no formal contact with environmental education, and the second to the special problems and teaching demands arising from its characteristic focus on the development of attitudes and values and appropriate behavioural change.

To take firstly the issue of philosophy: it appears that the level of discussion on the nature and objectives of environmental education has advanced considerably in the past decade. The sometimes bitter and generally unproductive arguments of the early 1970s about what was and was not related to environmental education seem now to have largely disappeared, being replaced by a more or less common dialogue about the nature and purpose of environmental education and ways in which it can be further developed. Nevertheless, despite this general and encouraging trend there still exist some significant areas of disagreement and confusion. One example concerns the distinction between environmental education as a movement or collective enterprise and as a description of individual activities or programmes. This distinction is an important one because of different expectations — in the former case that it necessarily reflects an interdisciplinary character and has a clear emphasis on problem-solving and decision-making activities; but this is not to say that a particular programme which fails to reflect these emphases has nothing to contribute to environmental education.

The Council of the City of Sydney – like many other councils around Australia – has embarked on a whole-of-council approach to establishing sustainable behaviours amongst its residents. In developing its Residential Environmental Action Plan - designed to motivate and bring about real change in resident choices and behaviours - the City sought to base its planning on a significant knowledge base.

It undertook a project which asked two fundamental questions: What does the literature say about behaviour change in the community? and What do the residents of the City of Sydney local government area say about the best ways to influence community behaviour? A review of behaviour change models and the conduct of focus groups and other informant interviews across the key demographics of the City of Sydney local government area, yielded two sets of criteria for behaviour change programs. Not surprisingly, both sets were similar and for ease of use they were merged into one shorter set of twelve criteria. These are useful in informing the design of programs or assessing whether existing programs are capable of affecting behaviour. The key claim in this paper is the importance of understanding both the theory and the local community at the design phase of any program. Good planning of behaviour change programs enables graceful interventions, the magic of co-learning and the power of adaptation.

The authors acknowledge the work and support of the City of Sydney in undertaking this project.

Significant progress has been made with respect to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in tertiary education institutions, particularly universities. There are also examples of ways in which sustainability has been incorporated into secondary schools and curricula, but with varying levels of success. ESD that has been incorporated in secondary schools has been shown to engage students and give more context to the curriculum, as well as enable students to develop the critical thinking required to tackle the big issues that face the planet now and into the future.

In the United Kingdom, while some aspects of sustainability have been introduced into the secondary school curriculum, they are often merged into other subjects and do not attract as much attention as traditional subjects. Furthermore, sustainability emphasis varies between schools, exam boards and teachers, leading to differing levels of understanding among teenagers. As a result, it could be argued that some young people fail to engage with global issues, which could be contributing towards the lower rates of young people voting in the United Kingdom. Promoting sustainable development, and how engineering can contribute towards it, could also potentially help reverse the decline in engineering student entries at universities, by attracting more interest to the engineering field. Thus, the question is raised as to how sustainability knowledge can be improved among teenagers.

The research investigated the scale and quality of ESD at secondary schools in the United Kingdom and recommended a range of solutions to improve sustainability teaching and thinking among teenagers. A range of research tools were used, including a literature and curriculum review, interviews and surveys with teachers and students, and a role-play case study.

The research involved a survey being conducted with 475 UK secondary school students aged 12–18 years. The survey was conducted to determine the current level of sustainability understanding of the students, where they learned about it, their preferences relating to issues facing the Earth, and how they think sustainability teaching could be improved. Surveys were purposely open ended, and teachers were instructed not to give prompts prior to the survey, to enable an accurate reflection of students’ knowledge. Results of the surveys varied across age group, school, overall attainment levels of students and exam boards. In general, results showed that while students are interested and knowledgeable about current issues, their level of understanding of sustainability is poor to moderate, and they want it to be taught in more subjects.

A gap analysis was then conducted with a curriculum review, survey results and interviews with teachers as inputs. The aim of the analysis was to determine the difference between a desirable level of knowledge and teaching of sustainability, and current practice. Among other things, the analysis indicated that interactive learning would be beneficial, and thus a role play, set in Cambridge and covering environmental, social and economic aspects, was designed and run at two schools in Cambridge. An element of competition was included, as well as a relatively open set of rules, to invoke creative solutions. Observation during the game indicated engaged students. Feedback from students indicated that the game was a fun and useful learning tool. Feedback from teachers was also positive, indicating that interactive teaching tools, like role plays, class debates and field experiments, can be very valuable towards teaching students about the complexities of sustainability.

After the role plays, the students were surveyed with identical questions to the initial survey. Results were compared, and sustainability knowledge and the ability to identify environmental issues was seen to increase significantly, far more so than originally expected. This increase in knowledge was highlighted by the students themselves in subsequent feedback sessions.

Finally, steps were proposed to improve sustainability education that could be implemented by schools and teachers or at the UK National Curriculum level:

• • a ‘Sustainability Week’ or sustainability short course to be run at early secondary school, with the aim to give students a holistic overview of sustainability;

• • aspects of sustainability, including real-world examples, to be included in all subjects and lead on from the short course;

• • interactive learning tools to be strongly encouraged and made available to all teachers;

• • training and support to be provided to teachers to improve understanding and ability to teach sustainability;

• • extra-curricular sustainability activities to be offered at all schools.

The mandate for living sustainably is becoming increasingly urgent. This article reports on the Climate Clever Energy Savers (CCES) Program, a student-centred, problem- and project-based program in New South Wales, Australia, aimed at enabling school students to identify ways of reducing their schools’ electricity consumption and costs. As part of the program, students apply for Department of Education and Communities funds to address issues of electricity usage, such as building or appliance modifications, or education campaigns. In particular, this article focuses on the systemic approach used to assist teachers and students in meeting the aims of the CCES program, the Sustainability Action Process (SAP). To ascertain the contribution and value of such a framework in achieving project outcomes and associated learning and attitudinal change, we investigated teachers’ and some students’ uses and opinions of the SAP via surveys (n = 434), 16 interviews, and analysis of documents such as student work samples and lesson outlines. Our research indicates that the SAP has been a highly effective, enabling and engaging tool in helping students to identify ways and means of reducing electricity consumption and evaluating their effectiveness, as well as identifying allies and other sources of assistance in carrying out their projects.

Except in small measure, environmental education in the United States has not yet challenged the status quo of Western notions of progress or monoculturalism, or recognized that moving through the environmental crisis may require significant shifts in generally unquestioned cultural attitudes and beliefs. In the U.S., environmental education has instead tended to focus on information regarding environmental problems and to explore topics such as endangered species, global climate change, or the water quality of local streams and rivers. Even this has become a source of controversy in the United States since the mid-1990s as a coalition of right-wing organizations has mounted a well-coordinated political campaign charging environmental educators with bias and a failure to present both sides of controversial issues (Sanera & Shaw 1996, Independent Commission on Environmental Education 1997). Despite this, we believe that if environmental education is to live up to its promise as a vehicle for developing a citizenry capable of making wise decisions about the impact of human activities on the environment, examining and altering fundamental cultural beliefs and practices that are contributing to the degradation of the planet's natural systems will be imperative.

We have chosen to call this extended form of environmental education ecological education. For us, ecological education connotes an emphasis on the inescapable embeddedness of human beings in natural settings and the responsibilities that arise from this relationship. Rather than seeing nature as other—a set of phenomena capable of being manipulated like parts of a machine—the practice of ecological education requires viewing human beings as one part of the natural world and human cultures as an outgrowth of interactions between our species and particular places. We believe that the development of sustainable cultures will in fact require widespread acceptance of a relationship between humans and the earth grounded in moral sentiments that arise from the willingness to care. As Indian physicist and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva writes, the term ‘sustainability’ implies the ability and willingness ‘to support, bear weight of, hold up, enable to last out, give strength to, endure without giving way’ (Shiva 1992, p. 191).

Cetacean watching is an increasingly popular economic activity in Ecuador for tourism operators. Despite government regulations, cetacean watching can have a negative impact on observed animal populations. To enhance good dolphin-watching practices, a course was carried out in Puerto El Morro, Ecuador about sensitisation activities promoting empathy towards and knowledge about bottlenose dolphins, local avifauna and mangrove ecosystems. The course provided tourism operator staff with theoretical and practical knowledge on dolphin physiology and ecology, with a focus on empathy towards the species and on regulations to be respected during the watching tours. The course included interactive workshops, didactic materials, advice, video screening and structured conversations. Two innovative questionnaires were implemented on the boat during 68 dolphin-watching tours to evaluate whether the training course had improved the regulation compliance and on-tour guiding quality of the tour guides and boat drivers. The results showed a statistically significant improvement in dolphin-watching practices in compliance with the “Regulations for the Whale and Dolphin Watching of Ecuador” (p = .0002) and in guidance quality (p = .0004) after the training course. Boat drivers were identified as influential actors in compliance with regulations and should also be included in the environmental awareness training courses. The study showed that empathy-based sensitisation and knowledge reinforcement positively affect policy compliance and can generate new sustainable approaches for future dolphin-watching activities.

This paper considers some recent ideas about tertiary environmental education and about environmentalism as an emerging social purpose of universities. It shows that total reliance on education about the environment results in unacceptable views of the environment, environmental education and environmental problems'. The paper considers approaches to teaching, arguing for one which assumes that learners construct their own concepts of the environment It distinguishes between current discipline-based teaching in universities and the more holistic Green Education. The paper concludes with a list of characteristics of Green Education which follow from the arguments presented.

Despite the ever-growing body of knowledge about human impact on the environment and the need to work towards a sustainable future, participation in environmental action initiatives among the general population remains low. There is an increasingly urgent need to develop a culture of participation among young people who in turn may become future leaders. This article describes a study that was undertaken to investigate pre-service teachers’ environmental knowledge, their willingness to participate in environmental initiatives, and their perceptions about environmental education in schools. The study participants were pre-service teachers between the ages of 19 and 22. Data were collected through online surveys, followed by focus group interviews where pre-service teachers were given the opportunity to expand and comment on the survey responses. Findings from this study are consistent with previous research on pre-service teacher literacy, attitudes, perceptions and participation. However, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions about the role of schools and adults in nurturing environmental awareness and active participation among youth provides educators with new insights for the development of a more comprehensive environmental education curriculum that focuses on integration of theory and action.

This article explores conceptualisations of sustainability and perceptions of its importance in curriculum held by business subject and program leaders. Results are reported from an empirical study of the first-year Bachelor of Business program at an Australian university. Research data was collected in 16 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with subject and program leaders over two teaching periods in 2011. Interview transcripts were analysed through the identification of key themes. The results reveal that teaching academics believe sustainability is something more dynamic and complex than they are able to feature in their subjects, reflecting the difficulty in appropriately conceptualising sustainability, as well as differences between the academics’ beliefs, intentions and actions. Few studies explore the conceptualisations of sustainability held by subject and program leaders. If business schools are to produce sustainability-savvy graduates, the teaching academics need to have a clear and, ideally, shared view of sustainability.

Cultures that recognise the many forces and memories held in landscape can make important contributions to climate emergency. We argue there is another group which has knowledge to call upon; young people growing up in post-industrial places. In this paper, we draw on over 10 years of research with young people to speculate about the potential of outsider knowledge as the basis for emplaced activism as an original and significantly new approach to environmental education. The first part of the paper presents the argument, concepts and methodology for thinking about environments as lived experience. Next we introduce the place where capitalist and industrial forces are knotted with the distinctive histories of post-industrial communities. Place is explored through stories of the geological and historical legacies of south Wale’s valleys in sections titled: Earth Matters; Industrial Matters; Affective Matters and Matters of Decline. Next, three lines of flight that took off in creative workshops with young people: Troubled Landscapes, Embodied Landscape and Activist Landscapes are presented. Finally, we set out a new approach to environmental education and research by asking what if environmental activism starts from young people’s troubled experiences of living in marginal and forgotten places?

I wish to make clear from the outset that I am not an environmental educator and therefore do not claim to be steeped in particular contemporary issues. I am aware of environmental concerns from a generalist viewpoint, one which I share with primary teachers expected to deliver environmental educational policy in practice. As an educator and researcher in the area of arts education, I frequently apply role playing methodologies to a range of curriculum areas focusing on human issues and would like to share some insights into its specific application to environmental education. I also wish to state that I have a particular interest in developing a socially critical approach to educational issues, so that the use of role play is coloured by this stance.

I have examined a number of policy statements which attempt to influence the content and teaching approaches to environmental education in schools. The Victorian Ministry of Education (1990) Environmental Education makes reference to the importance of student/teacher attitudes, beliefs and dispositions in the social construction of environmental education. Role play deals ‘up front’ with the dispositions of all participants, and thus would seem an ideal vehicle for investigating the human aspects of learning for the environment. The Victorian document (1990: p. 11) further makes clear the approaches teachers should adopt when realising environmental education in practice. Approaches to environmental education should be ‘based on real problems’, ‘clarify values’, be ‘socially critical’ and ‘action oriented’, and also ‘involve students working together in groups’. I wish to demonstrate how this cluster of recommended approaches can be met through the use of role play.

The paper has two intentions: The first is to discuss how role play can facilitate recommended environmental education in theory. The second is to show how these ideas may be practically realised during the investigation of a selected issue.

Vegemite, a thick, rich and salty product made from yeast extract, is a paste commonly spread on bread or toast in Australian households. This iconic product mirrors some of the unique aspects of this country. For example, Vegemite thinly spread is best. The population of this country is sparse across the wide lands, and the Australian environment with its thin soils, water shortages and intense climates, might also be described as spread thin. These aspects of context present challenges because Australia needs quality sustainability educators thick on the ground to deal with the many and diverse environmental issues.

This paper describes the development of the Australian National Professional Development Initiative for Sustainability Educators (NPDISE) and how it was infuenced by the Australian context. Multiple challenges existed: the size of the country, its environmental conditions and rich biodiversity, distance and space between major centres, distribution of people and resources, understanding of and support for education, and three tiers of government – each with its own policies, programs and priorities. On top of this, the practice of sustainability education crosses multiple professional sectors and disciplines. All these challenges had to be taken into account.

Research conducted by the Waste Management Association Australia in 2009 revealed that the needs of Australia's sustainability educators in overcoming many of these challenges were broadly consistent around Australia. This gave encouragement to the establishment of a national professional development approach for those working in the environmental education feld. This paper shows how four professional associations – Australian Association for Environmental Education, Waste Management Association Australia, Australian Water Association, and the Marine Education Society of Australasia – worked together for the frst time and approached these challenges whilst developing the NPDISE. A 1954 jingle said Vegemite would help children “grow stronger every single week”. The NPDISE represents a similar ethos with an emphasis on building the sector.

What would it be like to learn to live in and experience a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How can we learn to awarely participate in a world of communication and interaction, in which trees, crows and rivers may grace us with a response to our attention and our call? How do we learn not just to know this intellectually but ‘proved upon our pulses’, as John Keats put it. As artist and writer, we reflect on the contribution our practices can have to the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on living cosmos panpsychism and examples from our practice.

Education for Intercultural Understanding seeks a better world. Its principal goal is education for change through addressing social issues with an intercultural perspective arising at the local, national and especially international levels. Underpinning this cross-curricular dimension is education for a sustainable future - a core concern of Environmental Education.

This article will review Australia's engagement with international and intercultural education within formal education with a specific focus on its contribution to a sustainable future. It identifies recent influences that have shaped school policy and practice in this area. Lost opportunities are discussed as well as the scope for future developments, in particular within the socially critical fields of Citizenship Education, Futures Education, Global Education and Anti-racism Education as well as Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development. This paper is an extract from a recent report commissioned by the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Centre for Education for International Understanding (APCEIU).

The subject of environmental science (ES) was introduced into Bhutanese schools to educate students about sustainable environmental conservation. This study aims to answer the research question: What are the impacts of studying ES on Bhutanese students for environmental sustainability? The study employed mixed methods to draw data from interviews with six principals, 14 teachers and 189 students, and surveys with 14 teachers and 563 students from six secondary schools. Participants indicated the development of students’ Gross National Happiness value of sustainable environmental and socioeconomic development. However, an anthropocentric perspective appeared to be dominant among participants, suggesting a need to develop ecocentric worldviews to support sustainability. Most students noted their changed behaviours, development of optimism, stewardship and agency towards ecological sustainability from studying ES. To prepare students to take action to address sustainability issues, teachers could leverage students’ optimism, agency and stewardship through action-oriented approaches to teaching ES.

In the first part of the paper some features of the international 0ECD/CERI Project “Environment and School Initiatives” are described. The central idea of the project is to support teachers in educational activities that connect the promotion of dynamic qualities (such as initiative and self-confidence) with the promotion of environmental awareness. In the second part the project's philosophy and its educational implications are discussed: The main idea is that the increase in human-produced complexity has created a qualitatively new situation, in which local initiatives, long-term value-orientations and the wide-spread ability to reflect on one's own actions become a matter of survival. For the educational system this means a redefinition of its tasks to include reflective action on their environment by students and teachers and an appreciation of the value complexity of environmental problems.

Sense of place describes both affective and cognitive — emotional and intellectual — connections to place. Affective outcomes, tied to arts and humanities education, can facilitate these connections. But little research explores environmental science, arts and humanities (eSAH) curricula on place relationships. Additionally, most research on the sense of place focuses on repeated visits to a place over time, rather than short-term experiences like a field trip. Finally, digital technology is a growing trend across science education, but little research investigates its use in field-based contexts. Our research begins to address these gaps. This article describes an eSAH field trip for middle and high school learners. Using a conventional content analysis, we present pilot data from two high school field trips. Our findings illuminate a framework for understanding active and passive place relationships in the context of short-term interdisciplinary field learning experiences.

The author's experience of the day-to-day issues faced as an educator in an Aboriginal school are recounted, along with perspectives gained as part of a research project. The proposition is argued that an Education for Sustainability approach, where learning is structured around a negotiated environmental issue within local community, represents a cultural accommodation or halfway point between mainstream formal schooling and the needs of Indigenous learners. This article contends that such an educative approach meets Indigenous learners ‘halfway’, through compatibility with Indigenous values frameworks and employing culturally appropriate pedagogical methods. The argument is made that by demonstrating a willingness to negotiate worthwhile environmentally based projects that address community ecological concerns, EfS may be able to improve community support and mitigate impediments to the engagement of Indigenous learners with formal education. A critical pedagogy of place (Grunewald, 2003) is discussed as a theoretical framework that combines place-based pedagogy with empowering educational theory. Indigenous learners’ connection with place is recognised in this approach and ascribed a positive rather than negative value.

This paper reports on an investigation of the status of pre-school environmental education in Hong Kong through both a questionnaire survey and case studies. The study looked in particular at the environmental education activities organised, difficulties encountered in the implementation of environmental education and teachers' attitudes towards environmental education and teaching approaches. The findings indicated that pre-school environmental education tended to focus more on education about the environment than education in and for the environment. The results also revealed that the teachers' perceived barriers were mainly logistical, such as lack of time and resources, and educational in the sense that they felt that they lacked knowledge about environmental education. The implications for future development of environmental education are discussed.