The Significance of ‘Special Ways of Knowing’ for Environmental Education

Abstract

Attempts to model the learning process in environmental education were seriously pursued during the latter part of the 1970's (Greenall Gough 1993) and became a preoccupation with many researchers during the 1980's. This article which contributes to this body of research reports on a study undertaken between 1988 and 1994 (Mahony 1994). The project focused on a process antecedent to the above model, namely the manner by which a person comes to understand and relate to his or her environment, on the premise that a viable environmental education should be based on this foundation.This study of an adult rural population in the Wollombi Valley of NSW, Australia, combined a contextual historical survey with a qualitative field study derived from an interpretivist paradigm. It identified four intuitive and experiential ways of knowing which constituted well defined ideologies and for which the term ‘positions’ was adopted to convey an idea of their existential and entrenched character. The positions were designated Men of the Land, Earth People, Other Agenda Folk and Unaligned Individuals.