Abstract
Environmental education (EE) is a lifelong process to acquire knowledge and skills that can influence pro-environmental behavior, environmental activism, and disaster-risk management. Disabled people are impacted by environmental issues, environmental activism, and how EE is taught. Disabled people can be learners within EE but can contribute to EE in many other roles. Given the importance of EE and its potential impact on disabled people—and given that equity, diversity, and inclusion is an ever-increasing policy framework in relation to environment-focused disciplines and programs in academia and other workplaces, which also covers disabled people—we performed a scoping review of academic literature using Scopus and EBSCO-HOST (70 databases) as sources, to investigate how and to what extent disabled people are engaged with EE academic literature. Of the initial 73 sources found, only 27 contained relevant content whereby the content engaged mostly with disabled people as EE learners but rarely with other possible roles. They rarely discussed the EE impact on disabled people, did not engage with EE teaching about disabled people being impacted by environmental issues and discourses, and did not connect EE to environment-related action by disabled people. Results suggest the need for a more differentiated engagement with disabled people in the EE literature.
Highlights
We looked at which of the potential roles are evident for disabled people in Environmental education (EE), how disabled people are portrayed, and whether EE literature engages with the impact of environmental activism and environmental issues on disabled people
One full text refers to disabled people as learners within the full text, noting: “People with disabilities need to be able to access environmental education activities as part of their education, and people without disabilities need to better understand the barriers faced by people with disabilities and other forms of discrimination and work to enrich their experiences”. [130] (p. 17)
The findings of this scoping review suggest that there is a significant gap in academic literature surrounding the coverage of disabled people in EE and the impact of EE on disabled people
Summary
Disabled people encounter many social barriers [3,4,5,6,7,8,9], including in all forms of educational settings [7,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Disabled people are disproportionally impacted by environmental issues, such as those outlined by The United Nations 2018 Flagship Report on Disability and Development: Realization of the Sustainable Development Goals by, for and with Persons with Disabilities [20], and environmentalism [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]
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