Abstract
Environmental education has been contemplated as the field of study enabling people to live a sustainable livelihood. In recent years, the South African government took an initiative to integrate Environmental Education into all learning areas or subjects. Despite such inclusion, a gap still exists between what is learned in class and what learners are actually doing in their daily activities. Alexander and Poyyamoli, (2014: 1) suggest that Environmental Education is an essential advancement to encourage learners to save, protect and improve the local environment. As a result, the present paper seeks to examine the effectiveness of environmental education programmes in enforcing sustainability behaviours in school children and how it fosters the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, skills, attitude and behaviors compatible to sustainability. The paper employed sustainable indicators as an instrument to evaluation the effectiveness of environmental education programmes in promoting sustainable livelihood. Questionnaires were distributed to teachers, principals and learners from twenty schools in the district. Participants were subjected to pre-test, innovative sustainable living programmes, and post-test assessment. The results of the pre-test portrayed a gap of learners' knowledge, skills and attitude towards their environment, whereas the post-test results confirmed that EE promotes sustainable living when forged with EE programmes.
Highlights
Notwithstanding collaborative deliberations and initiatives implemented by our governments and non-governmental organisations to inculcate the concept of sustainability of our environments through the teaching of environmental education, a gap exists between what is learnt in class and their everyday activities
The objective of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of environmental education programmes in promoting sustainable living in secondary schools, embracing participatory action research (PAR)
The results revealed the strong link between water, electricity consumption and bills paid and most participating schools paid high monthly bills prior to exposure to environmental education programmes due to high resource consumption; the post-test results exhibited a decrease in schools paying high bills
Summary
Notwithstanding collaborative deliberations and initiatives implemented by our governments and non-governmental organisations to inculcate the concept of sustainability of our environments through the teaching of environmental education, a gap exists between what is learnt in class and their everyday activities. This paper introduces the integration of what is learnt (theory) to rigorous sustainable learning programmes of action (practice) It is for this cause that most schools continue threatening the integrity of the ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com environment through wasteful consumption of resources such as water, energy, paper, inks, toners and environmental pollution. What exacerbates the present-day situation is a lack of practice, ignorance or negligence and negative attitude toward the environment. This whole state of affairs warrants an alternate in the current way of teaching about the environment to the new innovative approaches which involve the implementation of environmental education programmes. The present investigation corroborates with the preceding studies by demonstrating that learners who had been directly engaged in handson activities had been able to considerably extend their learning capacity in contrast to those who were not (MacDiarmid & Duval, 2014)
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