Environmental adult education will succeed only if policy too can be influenced. If...[we come to] see the importance of adult and community-based education strategies, and understand that the goal of greater sustainability will not be met without critically engaging voters, consumers, workers, employers, landowners, media representatives, community activists, nurses, lawyers, doctors, poets and musicians .... who play such key roles in society. I have worked in the field of adult education for more than 18 years and became involved with environmental issues as a result of co-organizing, with a group of feminist adult educators, the International Journey for Environmental Education at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. I felt compelled to write this article for several reasons but in particular by an incident that took place at an environmental adult education workshop I was co-facilitating in Australia in December 2000. A few hours into the workshop, one of the participants asked if there was any difference between environmental adult education and environment education--the theory and practice that focuses on children and schools. My co-facilitator responded immediately that he did not feel there was any difference. Knowing their vast differences but never having articulated what they were, I was unable to respond effectively at the time. However, several participants highlighted a number of obvious differences. Nevertheless, the question has plagued me and I have decided to give it the attention it deserves. As my interest in this area has grown, so too has my realization that although 'environmental education' and what I will refer to as 'public/adult environmental education' have much to offer, their premises are fundamentally different from those we use in environmental adult education. In this article, I explore the bases of public/adult environmental education--awareness-raising and individual behavior change--and two inter-connected albeit contested fundamentals of environmental education: learning about and learning in the environment. Through these lenses and the medium of storytelling, I illustrate fundamental differences between these schools of thought and environmental adult education. These observations come from my own experiences of working with a diversity of adults around the world within complex environmental contexts that range from soil erosion to violence against youth, cultural homogenization to waste reduction (Clover, Follen, & Hall, 2000). Learning About the Environment: A Matter of Awareness and Behavior local is the landscape in which our treasured notions of community culture are both experienced and expressed. (Marla Guppy, 1999, p. 9) Although many more exist, there are two very important elements of critical adult education of relevance to this article. The first is a fundamental belief in so-called ordinary human beings--the belief that people have a diversity of knowledges acquired from a variety of difference experiences and these need to be acknowledged, explored and often challenged. By not only critically challenging assumptions and beliefs, but also encouraging dialogue and the emergence and development of existing knowledges, people can better take control of their situations and become actors or agents of (Cervero & Wilson, 2001; Clover, Follen, & Hall, 2000; Foley, 1995; Freire, 1977; Grace, 1998; Hart, 1992; Weiler, 1992; Welton, 1987; Westwood, 1980; Wildermeersch, 1998). The second is a belief that adult education should provide adults in both formal and nonformal settings with opportunities to examine critically, ideological systems and societal structures that hinder and impede human development and socio-environmental change (Welton, 1995, p. 13). Adult education is a process through which we take-up social, cultural, historical, economic, and political considerations [and radically question] the status quo, corporate capitalism and threats to social democracy (Grace,1998, p. …
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Sep 11, 2015
Craig P Marshall 
Open Access
