FEN 3 – Arguing the case for multiple approaches

In commenting on my post on Monday, Alan Red reminded me of my pragmatic approach to issues of research, and of something I'd written in 1999 for Educational Studies: Environmental Education: Arguing the case for multiple approaches

This paper develops existing arguments about the need to rethink ways in which environmental education is conceptualised, interpreted and enacted by schools, teachers and students working within their communities.  In doing this, it critiques what it sees as the narrowing and constraining influence that socially critical theory has exerted over the field, and calls for multiple approaches, carefully and communally deliberated on, in order to deliver the (environmental) educational goals deemed appropriate and necessary by schools and communities.  Such an approach, it is argued, will likely be cross-disciplinary and multi-faceted in that it will be informed by a combination of traditions and ideological persuasions which together will offer more than any one of them could alone.

It is clear to me now that it was unfair to single out socially critical theory for this criticism.  It ought to have been focused on hegemonic tendencies within positivist and post-positivist traditions as well.  It actually took me 15 years to redress this balance, but I finally managed it in the chapter I wrote for Matar and Jucker's 2014 book.  Here's the relevant piece under the heading: Change, continuity and critique

"For the UN (2004), the overall goal of the DESD was to integrate the values inherent in sustainable development into all aspects of learning to encourage changes in behaviour that would create a more sustainable future in terms of environmental integrity, economic viability, and a just society for present and future generations.

This emphasis on human behaviour change fits uneasily with the 1970s focus on values, cognition, skills and attitudes, but behaviour change as an educational goal was firmly established within environmental education. As Hungerford and Volk confidently asserted:

"The ultimate aim of education is shaping human behaviour" (1990:302) where responsible citizenship behaviour can be developed through environmental education.  The strategies are known. The tools are available. The challenge lies in a willingness to do things differently than we have in the past. (Hungerford & Volk 1990: 317)

Put simply, this approach says that:

– if we can create a curriculum that takes sustainability issues seriously

– provide enough information about ecological concepts and environmental inter-relationships,

– provide carefully-designed opportunities for learners to acquire environmental sensitivity and a sense of empowerment,

– enable learners to acquire analytical and investigative skills, and citizenship action skills.

… then they will acquire understanding and both cognitive and social skills, their attitudes will shift, and then their behaviour will change in pro-sustainability ways.

This very influential model is rooted in a scientific-realist view of the world and draws on the notion of responsible environmental behaviours arising out of Ajzen & Fishbein's (1980) theory of planned behaviour. It sees behaviours as the interaction of the "desire to act" with "situational factors" and brings together issues associated with an understanding of scientific and ecological concepts and how these relate to our everyday lives, and the psychological influences on those lives. Hungerford and Volk elaborated two curricular strategies concerned with issue identification and action taking which found a reflection in work on action competence (Jensen & Schnack 1997; 2006) in Denmark, although the Danes did not make the mistake of thinking, as Hungerford & Volk (1990: 303) did, that the "major methods of citizenship action" could be divorced from the "investigation of issues". Nor did Jensen & Schnack ever think that education should set about developing citizens who will behave in desirable ways.

This continued emphasis on individual behaviour change pervades current thinking about the outcomes of ESD programmes. See, for example, Vare & Scott (2008) for a comment on the tendency within global learning and development education programmes in schools to promote (as opposed to critically appraise) fair trade schemes.

A serious problem with the Hungerford and Volk model lies in its separation of the desire to act from 'situational factors'; that is, from the social and economic context within which those acts will take place. This is a naïve notion of citizenship that assumes that the desire to act is volitional as opposed to existential, and it looks as if all non-psychological and rather awkward socio-economic issues were dumped into a box labelled 'situational factors'. A distinct benefit of using a sustainability discourse (as opposed to just an environmental one) is that such conveniences are ruled out on conceptual grounds. Sustainability's framing embraces economic and social issues together with environmental ones, the first two cannot just be wished away by focusing only on pro-environment behaviours, to the exclusion of social justice, the elimination of poverty, and the like. Our experience of living and working requires us all to navigate our way through these incommensurate ideals both at global, national, community and family levels.

It is understandable why all this invited the sort of criticism which soon came from critical realists (Robottom & Hart, 1995) within environmental education in opposition to what they saw as a behaviourist emphasis and a complete failure to critique socio-political circumstances within which all such behaviours were to be embedded. Their purposes, rooted in emancipatory action research (Fien 1993), were to help teachers and students work towards social transformation. Theirs was an alternative model which was grounded in a desire to bolster social and ecological justice and through this reduce socio-economic disparities. It came to be associated with development education, and an opposition to neo-liberal approaches of all kinds. This model sets out to effect social rather than behaviour change and has cognitive and affective elements. Its use has largely been with teachers and teacher trainers (see Huckle 2006), and is associated with socially-critical theory and its focus on the economic forces that direct and buffet our lives. The purposes of this perspective on ESD is to show teachers and students how to analyse the values behind their socially-learned behaviour patterns and how to resist such forces and work towards social transformation. A key focus was helping students and teachers to ask appropriate socially-critical questions, typically of the cui bono? form.

This model, put simply, says:

– if we can influence opinion-formers (e.g. teachers), and through them, influence learners,

– raising their awareness and consciousness (and countering false-consciousness) of the issues that prevent a sustainable society,

– then their under-pinning values will be changed,

… and they will argue, work, vote and agitate for (pro-sustainability) social change.

This perspective also opposed what it saw as liberal education's tendency not to ask critical questions of society because of its focus on the individual as a learner where an education was, to a significant degree, seen as for itself— i.e, the outcome was an educated individual whose knowledge, understanding, skills and other attributes were well grounded within the prevailing culture, and whose literacy had critical dimensions as well as functional and cultural (Stables 2010). A critique of this liberal tradition would be that there is too little emphasis on behaviour modification and insufficient focus on social inequities and the need for change. The liberal educators' response to this is that encouraging critical questions of society, and looking for the need for change, is at its heart, it is just that the answers are never pre-specified as they tend to be in socially-critical or behavioural approaches. And it is, they argue, no business of educators to persuade learners to change behaviours or society in pre-specified ways. Rather, this is the business of politicians and socio-political activists, social marketers and the advertising industry, but not of educators. Of course, a pertinent response to this might be that it illustrates a liberal education blind spot, as its own preferred approach to education contributes towards the perpeptuation of particular social models. ..."

..................................

Scott W (2014) Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): a critical review of concept, potential and risk. In R Matar & R Jucker (Eds) Schooling for Sustainable Development in Europe: Concepts, Policies and Educational Experiences at the End of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Dordrecht: Springer. pps 47-70