Who are the children that environmental education targets? Mapping geographic and conceptual boundaries in more-than-human environmental education research

Currently, as human society develops, environmental issues have become one of the significant challenges faced by humanity. Consequently, environmental education has emerged in response to this need. Environmental education aims to cultivate citizens with knowledge about the environment, which is crucial in addressing global challenges, fostering human–nature sustainability knowledge, and cultivating resilient individuals and communities. A comprehensive analysis of the current state of environmental education and exploring how environmental education can enhance the sustainability of interactions between humans and nature is one of the focal points of contemporary research. This systematic review employs CiteSpace to visually analyze the advancements of environmental education research, aiming to uncover the current status, predominant themes, evolutionary trajectories, and emerging trends. The Web of Science core collection database was examined to retrieve environmental education research papers published from 2013 to 2022. A total of 1851 papers were included in the final analysis. CiteSpace was utilized for visualizing and analyzing environmental education researchers, keyword co-occurrences, and keyword clustering, and Timeview was employed to generate relevant maps. The analysis identified five major hotspots in environmental education research: environmental awareness and literacy, theories in environmental education, delivery modes and methods, developments and implementation of environmental education, and the intersection of climate change and environmental justice. Emerging research directions include environmental justice, climate change education, critical environmental education, and environmental citizenship education. The results show that environmental education is gradually transcending the natural realm currently and integrating into a holistic framework encompassing societal, economic, and political dimensions. Environmental citizenship education is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars. Solving environmental problems requires interdisciplinary dialogue.

The first research symposium, organised in conjunction with the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) biennial conference, began with a dialogue between scholars at three different academic career stages. As we all entered the field at different periods in its development, the first part of our presentation and this article provide our perspectives on the context, approaches and issues that characterised the field at the time we became involved in environmental education (EE) and EE research. The second part of this article presents the lessons we have learnt from EE research, and where we see the field headed in the future.

Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.1 (Spring 2003) ISSN 1546-2250 Retrospective The Decade Following Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education Research Rick Mrazek The University of Lethbridge In 1994, Louise Chawla reviewed the monograph Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education Research (Mrazek 1993a), published by the North American Association for Environmental Education. To me, her review was very accurate and insightful and a great credit to Children’s Environments (CE) in its choice of reviewers. It is a pleasure to be invited to look back over the last 10 to 14 years and reflect on the vision, the challenges, and the promises surrounding and evolving from this publication for this author, as it relates to the review. Although there have been incredible advances in our knowledge, understandings, and in particular our communication technologies, the attitudinal and societal perceptions related to this work may have changed very little. The Original Vision At its annual conference in 1990, the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) [http://www.naaee.org/] held a symposium called “Contesting Paradigms in Environmental Education Research.” The symposium took up questions about the nature and history of different research paradigms: the assumptions that each makes about theory and practice, including definitions of rigor, validity, and generalizability, and views about the nature of teachers, learners, subject matter, and the learning environment. Contributions there became the nucleus for the monograph. Chawla correctly identified that “according to the editor, Rick Mrazek, the purpose of the collection is to invite participation in debate over philosophy, theory, and practice in environmental research, with the goal of ultimately finding “signposts which help 282 provide direction.” That direction, the reader was left to assume, was to make sense of the debate itself and to select personally congenial research approaches as starting points to begin a journey of exploration into environmental education research. It was gratifying to read, “For readers who are interested in understanding the status of North American environmental education research at this time, it is an illuminating volume”(Chawla 1994). The shortcomings identified were also known to the author and readily identified the need to continue this work. When the original printing of the monograph was depleted and there was no indication from the NAAEE for a further printing, this work was made available online. In the first four years of being searchable online, the “hit” counter topped out at 10,000. This work was subsequently translated into Spanish through the efforts of Edgar Gonzalez Gaudiano and published by Universidad De Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico (Mrazek 1996). It was used as the text in research courses for the first graduate programs in Environmental Education at three universities in Mexico and through distance education in Central and South America. The Challenges It is difficult to describe the tension, and support, that existed around these efforts. Louise Chawla captures part of this in her observation that “the most extreme example of combativeness rather than cooperation is the paper ‘Beyond Behaviorism’ by Ian Robottom. Robottom…notes that the original 1990 symposium on which the monograph is based was titled ‘Contesting Paradigms in Environmental Education Research’ and he argues that ‘contesting paradigms,’ not ‘alternative paradigms,’ should have been maintained in the monograph title” (Chawla 1994). In order to bring contributions representing a number of different research orientations and philosophies together under one cover, some concessions were necessary. Chawla observed that this could be viewed as either a major strength or weakness of the work: “In keeping with its goal of inviting the broadest possible participation, it presents different approaches critically but non-judgmentally, leaving final evaluation and choices up to the reader.” This was a similar approach taken by Marcinkowski and Mrazek (1996) in 283 Research in Environmental Education, which was the result of several years of collaborative work among several university faculty and graduate students across North America. This annotated bibliography of research included theses, journal and professional organization articles as well as structures for accessing and interpreting this research. An explanation of this work is provided in Mrazek and Marcinkowski (1997) as chairs of the North American Commission in Environmental Education Research. Louise Chawla cited John Disinger’s note “that the scope of environmental education...

Northern theories like “new materialism” and “posthumanism” are, increasingly, influential in the global productions of knowledge in environmental education (EE). In this latest discursive phase of textualising EE, the conceptual mash of “new/post” idea(lism)s is easily identified, but not critically examined, as is undertaken here via three interrelated critical case studies of key idea(l)s in the new/post. Criticism of the current normative, theoretical, methodological, and empirical mess of environmental education research (EER) must be understood within three historical and structural problems, namely; (i) the formative stages of modern EE in the 1970s, (ii) the escalating importance of theory in the 1990s transition from modern thought to postmodern thinking, (iii) the neo-liberalization of academic identity formations and post-intellectual relations in the audit culture of the corporate university of the 2000s. The first two closely related case studies of the new/post highlight the ahistorical and atheoretical mash of performatively-driven abstract theorizing in EE. Each demonstrates how earlier “founding” policy of EE, its implied pedagogical praxis, and commensurable methodological development in EER have been forgotten. The first critique focusses historically on the allegedly new idea of “agential relations” and its confused discursive claims about “action”. Forgotten is the vital matter of “ecology” and its relational “things”. The second rescues the ecofeminist notion of “embodied materialism”. Ecofeminist praxis has been deactivated by the new/post abstraction of feminist poststructural knowledge claims on “material-discursive practices”. Together, these interrelated critiques retrieve a much needed historical-critical-material frame from which new/post textualism can be conceptually reconstructed and empirically qualified in ways that reactivate the ecopolitical rationale for founding EE. If, indeed, theory is needed in ecopedagogical praxis, an alternative case exists for “bringing theory back in” via, for example, ecophenomenology, ecological anthropology, and ecohumanism. Ecopedagogical practices and their research might then (re)”turn” to a realist ontology via, for example, the “materialisms” of the “new” of “speculative realism” coupled with the “old” (sic) of “critical realism” in, strangely, “post post” claims on knowledge production. At issue in de-abstracting, re-materializing, repoliticizing, and decentering the hubristic authority of theory in new/post EER are numerous axiological commitments, epistemological issues, and methodological dilemmas concerning the onto ∼ ethics ∼ politics of (mis)representation in the global North. Underpinning the two case critiques is a third “criticism” of the postmodern means (mediums/modes) of knowledge production (forms) as they “intersectionally” perform a digitally platformed and instrumental colonization of the global North and South discourse of EER. “Other”wise, in the post-intellectual climate change of a universalizing new\\post technics of “agentialism,”, we misrecognize who we are textually “becoming” and, in being so post-inscribed and newly-mediated, are distracted from what “really” practically matters in the field, and why it “materially” exists.

Celebrating the 8th International Invitational Research and Development Seminar This edition of the EEASA Journal celebrates the hosting of the 8th International Invitational Research and Development Seminar on Environmental and Health Education in South Africa in March 2005. The International Invitational Research and Development Seminars are ‘special events’ in the field of environmental and health education research. They are characterised by their democratic, deliberative nature, and by their intent to scope innovation and methodological issues. First established some years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark, these seminars have provided an evolving international forum for researchers interested in research methodology to meet and frame new themes, trends and issues arising in the field of environmental education and healtheducation research. More specifically, this edition of the EEASA Journal profiles some of the insights and perspectives introduced and deliberated at this Invitational Seminar, notably situated culture, ethics and new learning theory. It opens a conversation on the significance of these themes for environmental education research at the start of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainability. Of the 11 feature articles, five were presented and discussed at the 8th International Invitational Seminar in March 2005, with an additional paper making its way into the journal from earlier deliberations at the 7th International Invitational Seminar, hosted in Alaska in 2004. Of interest, however, is the way in which the other papers in the journal (not presented at the Invitational Seminars) also reflect encounters with situated culture, ethics and new learning theory in different ways.

Purpose Environmental education (EE) and EE research (EER) is grappling with the precarious nature of human’s relationship with Nature that raise significant ethical and political challenges. Acknowledging and (re)acting to these challenges, which includes decentering, draws on decades of theory concerning the possibilities of “ecological awareness” through environmental (outdoor) activities and practices. Design/methodology/approach We propose to critically review these assumptions using three recently published conceptual-methodological-(eco)pedagogical frameworks for EE and EER: (1) A “new theories” mindmap presented as one of the generative responses/reactions of the special issue “Global politics of knowledge production in EER: ‘New’ theory and North-South representations”, published in 2020 in The Journal of Environmental Education. (2) First author’s autophenomenography on walking with/in nature as ecopedagogy. (3) Second author’s research on movementScapes as ecomotricity. More specifically, we will address the question: how can these three frameworks help to overcome some of the problems/gaps with decentering in research and practice in EE? Findings In doing so, we will canvas some of the questions posed in the “Decentring the Human in Qualitative Research Methodologies” seminar series, hosted by the Australian Association for Research in Education in 2024: (Q1) What is decentering the human to you? (Q2) What does decentering the human look like in our research (and practice)? (Q3) What do you see as the challenges and opportunities that decentering the human in educational research creates? Originality/value We anticipate the reflexivity of the field will be critically advanced.

This article describes future trends in environmental education (EE) research based on a mixed-methods study where data were collected through a content analysis of peer-reviewed articles published in EE journals between 2005 and 2010; interviews with experts engaged in EE research and sustainability-related fields; surveys with current EE researchers; and convenings with EE researchers and practitioners. We discuss four core thematic findings: (1) EE researchers are highlighting the importance of collective and community learning and action; (2) EE researchers are placing increased emphasis on the intersection of learning within the context of social–ecological communities (e.g. links between environmental quality and human well-being); (3) a pressing need exists for research conducted with urban and diverse populations; and (4) research around social media and other information technologies is of great interest, yet currently is sparse.

In William Scott's plenary address at the World Environmental Education Conference, he expressed concerns about the relevance of environmental education research in a world facing global environmental and demographic change. In responding to Scott's concerns, I argue that addressing challenges related to development and the environment requires examining EE goals at multiple levels as well as bridging diverse disciplines. I further suggest that integrating social‐ecological systems and other approaches in environmental education research may provide a means for consilience among potentially divisive environmental education practice and research traditions. In so doing, I hope to spark debate about possibilities for an environmental education research agenda and learning organisation that spurs action relevant to concerns about the environment, individuals, and their communities.

This paper addresses the question of how Australian environmental education (EE) research was conceptualised and contextualised in the decade of the 1990s. Sixty seven articles published by Australian authors in this journal from 1990–2000 were analysed to examine the conceptualisation of this research using an inductive emergent categorisation approach and a five frames model (Reid, in press) of key arguments and debates in the field. Contextualisation was explored in relation to specialist areas, scale and environmental dimensions of focus. A search for a coherent and distinct meaning of of this research was explored by making comparisons with international environmental education research during a similar time period that was the subject of two reviews. These analyses revealed that Australian environmental education research can be characterised as questioning and challenging prevailing (at the time) environmental education orthodoxies by critiquing and theorising the conceptual and curriculum framing of environmental education, most commonly from a socially critical and global perspective. Specialist areas and educational sectors that received little attention are also discussed.

This article outlines the state of the art in German research on environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD). Empirical German research on the importance of environmental education and ESD for schools is analysed in relation to three research fields. First, survey research describes the practice of environmental education and ESD, for example in the ways instruction is organised by teachers and pupils. Second, research on innovation analyses strategies for implementing environmental education and ESD in the school system, while third, research on teaching and learning examines the effects of teaching and learning processes. In describing the state of the art, longitudinal research providing evidence on the development from environmental education to ESD is examined, as are teachers’ understandings of the new concept. The results of innovation and teaching‐learning research allow us to identify research gaps and challenges, and to make recommendations for future research.

This paper reports the current status of and opinions on environmental education research in Japan taking into account researchers' discussion prior to publishing the 20th anniversary issue of “Japanese Society for Environmental Education”. The introduction describes the context and purpose of this paper, and the 2nd section looks back at the approaches considered at the 10th anniversary academic conference. The 3rd section details the aims and the methods of the 20th anniversary special edition project. The goal is not only to develop each person's ideas on environmental education research but also to have a deeper discussion about environmental education. The proposed methods of achieving this were round table talks, general remarks and criticism by theme, the omnibus paper, and other source data. In the 4th section, among the four approaches, the round table talk is reviewed and explained. Fragmentation of current research is pointed out, as is the need for systemizing environmental education. Pertaining to a method of systematization in the future, some suggested creating a world map of examples of environmental education, and making a database. The 5th section covers the general remarks and criticism by theme and summarizes them. The following eight themes are also analyzed: nature conservation education, pollution education, environmental education as a part of school education, environmental education during early childhood, environmental education related to food-agriculture, environmental education with other countries, environmental education and education for sustainable development, and environmental education about lifestyle. In conclusion, the paper argues that currently environmental education research is continuous and discontinuous, and also that methods for environmental education research are in their draft phases, like a map made from individual case studies and general criticism. Also, it is possible to say that masters' theses could be case studies and doctoral theses could be drafts.

This chapter turns the reader to critical debates and typologies in the environmental education research and literature. Such debates are contextualised within early childhood education and play pedagogies in particular. The authors initially discuss the concepts of sustainable development and sustainability, leading to further critical discussion around the apparent tensions between environmental education and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)/Education for Sustainability (EFS). The authors challenge the dominant aligning of Education for Sustainability (EFS) and early childhood education, arguing that such alignment is grounded within traditional ideas about children’s play. Rather the authors focus upon situating environmental education within contemporary play-based pedagogies. The chapter explores how understanding play-based pedagogy in terms of the role of the teacher is helpful because it widens understandings of ‘play’ so that content and educator interactions are valued alongside children’s activities and interests. Such understandings are essential with respect to supporting children in developing ecocentric or biophilic dispositions.

The environmental education movement developed in the 1970s at the same time as the environment movement, the feminist movement and the ecofeminist movement. However, while environmental education feels a close affinity with the environment movement the relationship with the (eco)feminist movement in environmental education research has been less than robust. Although there was some feminist environmental education research in the 1990s and 2000s, until the two recent special issues of The Journal of Environmental Education there had been a prolonged, even a deafening, silence around gender, eco/feminism and environmental education research. This chapter traces the history of feminist environmental education research across this and other environmental education research journals to argue that it is time for gender to be much higher on the agenda of environmental education researchers and of journals if we are to better achieve gender equality and more fully address the climate emergency within the field.

ABSTRACTThe environmental education movement developed in the 1970s at the same time as the environment movement, the feminist movement and the ecofeminist movement. However, while environmental education feels a close affinity with the environment movement the relationship with the (eco)feminist movement in environmental education research has been less than robust. Although there was some feminist environmental education research in the 1990s and 2000s, until the two recent special issues of The Journal of Environmental Education there had been a prolonged, even a deafening, silence around gender, eco/feminism and environmental education research. This article traces the history of feminist environmental education research across this and other environmental education research journals to argue that it is time for gender to be much higher on the agenda of environmental education researchers and of journals if we are to better achieve gender equality and more fully address the climate emergency within the field.

Recent analyses of the field of environmental education research have highlighted its rapidly expanding size and increasingly diverse nature (e.g. Hart & Nolan, 1999). This article reports on a review of a particular part of this field - namely, recent empirical studies of learners and learning in primary or secondary school environmental education. The review focuses specifically on the nature and quality of the evidence generated by the work in this area. The concern with evidence is motivated by the tendency of previous reviews to focus on methodological trends more than research findings. Claims have also been made that environmental education theory and research have overlooked 'the children who are the subjects of environmental education' (Payne, 1998a, p. 20). This review contends that efforts to address such shortcomings need to be informed by a thorough and grounded understanding of what studies have, and have not, been undertaken on students and learning, and what is known, and not known, from the evidence that these studies have generated. In its methods, the review seeks to be systematic, comprehensive and analytical. Its findings are based on careful scrutiny of over 100 journal articles, books and reports, published between 1993 and 1999. It proposes that the current evidence base on learners and learning can be understood in terms of six concentrations or nodes of evidence. Three of these are well established (students' (i) environmental knowledge (ii) environmental attitudes and behaviours, and (iii) environmental learning outcomes), while three can be regarded as emerging (students' (i) perceptions of nature, (ii) experiences of learning, and (iii) influences on adults). The recent research evidence and key messages associated with each of these nodes are discussed in successive sections of the review. Overall, the review suggests that the evidence base on learners and learning, while considerable in size, is less diverse in terms of methodological and theoretical approaches than the wider environmental education research field within which it is situated. The evidence base also provides more information about students' environmental knowledge and attitudes than about their educational experiences and preferences, and more about learning outcomes than about learning processes . These characteristics, however, are not static. The research and evidence base on learners and learning is developing and changing as new foci emerge, bringing with them different methodological and conceptual approaches. The review identifies issues and challenges arising from the recent evidence on learners and learning for research users, researchers and future reviews of the field. As well as highlighting possible practical implications of the research, it makes a case for studies focused more explicitly on learning and the role learners play within this process. It also suggests a need for user reviews as well as academic reviews in the field of environmental education.