What Student's Perceptions Tell Us About Teaching Environmental Education

Abstract

Throughout Australia there has been a substantial interest in enviromental education for more than a decade. Much human and financial effort has gone into curriculum development at the school level and into support for implementation via inservice education, conferences, workshops, etc. Relatively little systematic evaluation of these efforts has been undertaken at the level of what students are learning.Most definitions of enviromental education internationally and in Australia emphasise the importance of affective learning concerning the environment alongside more usual cognitive knowledge and skills. Accordingly any evaluation should recognise this somewhat unusual balance among the intended learnings compared with most other subject areas.Recent research in several areas of school learning has brought out the importance of starting with an explicit recognition of the perceptions and understandings students already hold about topics. Teaching and learning of the topic then ought to be processes that enable the learners to generate or construct from these starting points, new understandings and perceptions. There has, however, been almost no research, apart from a comparative study by Schaeffer and his co-workers of West German and Phillippino secondary school students' associations with the word, ENVIRONMENT. (Schaeffer, 1979; Hernandez, 1981; Villavicencio, 1981). This paper reports an attempt in Victoria to begin to fill these gaps.