Without contextualization and explicit links to centuries of relevant educational theories, research presentations at conferences risk appearing disconnected from teaching method development or evaluation. Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE), is a highly vibrant research area, benefitting from the work of hundreds of scholars all over the world. The aim of this paper is not to belittle the work done by ESE researchers. On the contrary, the quality of ESE research is evident in the various journals covering the field. Rather, this is an appeal to researchers to exercise vigilance in their claims, and to avoid focusing only on outcomes when participating in conferences. Normative statements instructing students or the general public on how to behave, or how not to behave, can be both unethical and undemocratic. We argue that ESE research can avoid such issues of normativity by incorporating elements of, and insights from, educational philosophy.
1. Introduction—The Forgotten E and the Risk of Normativity
In the following, the role of education is briefly discussed as a prelude to reflection on some of the authors’ personal experiences at two recent Educational research conferences. This is followed by examples of how tendencies toward normativity and behavior modification occur and influence educational activities. Educational philosophy offers a reminder of the risks of focusing on societal outcomes and changing public behavior rather than the educational process. Previous research initiatives incorporating insights from educational philosophy are presented, followed by an example of how more recent philosophical contributions can provide inspiration for the further development of ESE research. The inspiration for this paper stems, in part, from the concept of “bad practice” as presented in Lysgaard’s doctoral thesis [
1]. We hope and believe that the philosophical gleanings from the study of “bad practice” can serve as examples of “good research practices” in the field of ESE.
This paper highlights the risk that, without a connection to educational philosophy, Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) research can result in normative statements that may essentially be regarded as mis-educative. All education is normative in the sense that it has a purpose [
2]. The “normativity” that is problematized here is the tendency to use ESE as a platform for prescribing how the knowledge that is acquired in school should be applied beyond the learning context. Change for the “better”, whatever this might mean, can be a noble cause, but it should not tempt researchers and educators to force distinct “solutions” and behavior change strategies onto students and members of the public. The importance of a critically informed and action competent public is still central in Environmental Education/Education for Sustainable Development (EE/ESD). The purpose of this paper is thus to signal the need for more democratic and student participative ESE research by providing examples of connections between ESE research and educational philosophy.
The meaning of the word education in environmental education has already been discussed by scholars like Jickling [
3], who also includes sustainable development issues in the same discussion. “While environmental education is in the midst of a conceptual muddle the same can be said for sustainable development” (p. 4). Here, the muddle refers to the question of whether EE or ESD really fulfills the essential criteria of the E for education, such as enhancing the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and supporting the development of independent thought. The pressing question is how ESE research helps to “clear the waters”, both at a general and specific level. The arguments regarding normativity that have been used against ESD, by for example Jickling, are also relevant when looking at the normative teaching traditions that dominate contemporary EE in Sweden [
4]. Normative teaching that leans towards behavior modification seems to prevail in the often overlapping Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development, which we will henceforth collectively refer to as Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE).
Other contemporary researchers also highlight the missing E in ESE. For example, Wals and Kieft [
5] discuss normativity in terms of transmissive education and instructional forms of teaching related to the space available for student participation:
The often forgotten “E” in ESD can be conceptualized in different ways, depending on the amount of space there is for participation, self-determination and autonomous thinking. When this space is narrow, a more transmissive version of ESD is likely to result with a strong emphasis on instructional forms of teaching and knowledge transfer. When this space is broad, then ESD will emerge that is characterized by higher levels of participation, self-determination, autonomous thinking and knowledge co-creation. The latter, more transformative, versions of ESD require alternative teaching and learning strategies that also allow for the development of new competences.
The discussion about the forgotten E focuses more on the teaching process, or the means—the approach to teaching and learning—and not just the end, such as the content to be learned or other “products” like specific behavior. Our subjective experience is that research presentations at ESE conferences often focus on things like concepts of sustainability, knowledge gaps, more ecologically correct behavior and policy issues. In this way, presenters emphasize a specific outcome or product that could be useful in the future and which is beyond the educational situation. Sometimes research is conducted from a practitioner’s perspective, with a desire to change practices and everyday life. However, in such instances, reflections on the moral aspects of teaching and learning are not always strong.
In many ways, the argument put forward by this paper relates to the central question of what education is for. This is not the same as asking what education should do. The latter is often answered by traditional educational strategies in terms of how to prepare youth to democratically take part in future societal development. Hannah Arendt [
6] encourages us to relinquish the view of education as a preparation for something that will come later. However, Arendt [
6] also reminds us that children and adults belong to different worlds—an educative and a political—and that these two worlds need to be separated. She also emphasizes that the function of education is “to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living” (p. 195). The crucial point that Arendt raises here is that any political use of education—any “attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli” (p. 176)—can only be regarded as indoctrination. One lesson that can be learned from these ideas is that we should avoid pushing a normative agenda when involved in education and educational research. Instead, as Arendt implies, the actual educational situation is a space for explorative actions [
7]. If the purpose of the teaching is to promote specific societal development, then the educational intentions ought to predict what a future society will look like. However, as no one knows what the future will bring, democratic considerations, such as whose ideas are most fruitful, why they are worth considering and in whose interests, remain central in education and ESE research.
The question “What is education for?” is expressed by Biesta [
8] as the essence of “education”, which is not the same as the idea of education as a treatment or intervention as a causal means to bring about particular pre-established ends.
What is needed for education is a model of professional action that acknowledges the non-causal nature of educational interaction and the fact that the means and ends of education are internally rather than externally related. What is needed, in other words, is an acknowledgment of the fact that education is a moral practice, rather than a technical or technological one.
The moral character of education leads us to conclude that normativity, or the value-laden context in which facts and actions are communicated by educators, needs to be scrutinized and openly discussed. One way of making external ESD more internally related is to start asking moral questions about what ESE means to us, i.e., whose interests does ESE serve? This type of general discussion about education could also be transferred to discussions about the values of ESE research. Local negotiations (within the research area) bring individuals (researchers) together to talk about the future of the research area and their expectations. However, claims about what research should achieve beyond the research area risk making research itself normative.
At the same time, it is important to remember that the learner is not an island. The learner cannot take fully autonomous decisions. We are all part of a culture and socialized into both explicit and implicit societal norms. What happens if the informed individual makes “wrong” decisions? If actions are harmful to society and/or nature, there ought to be some kind of legislation to prevent this type of action. It is up to the politicians to defend our “commons”. When Jensen and Schnack [
9] worked with action competence some pupils actually took “wrong” actions. Their argument was that it is not the task of education to make changes in society. All the actions taken were only for educational reasons, such as learning specific knowledge and developing fruitful abilities through the actions. This could be called “education for education’s sake”. Actions are the responsibility of each individual, and if they clash with common interests, there ought to be some kind of societal restriction through common ideologies or policies. This is not an attempt to find an easy theoretical fix, because the relationship between individuals and society will always be marked by clashes and will always need to be understood. However, it is an argument that forces the individual learner to critically navigate in a future society. The educator cannot predict how the informed learner should use his competence to act in the “best way”. This is an educational dilemma, and a number of questions are available that can guide us, as educators and researchers, in the process of deciding how a critical stance towards the future should be developed. Examples of such questions are: What interests are at play? For whom? And why?
It is important to stress that the field of ESE continues to push important and necessary agendas, as demonstrated in Ardoin, Clark and Kelsey’s survey of future trends [
10]. Although central future topics might include community and the link between the social and ecological, urbanity and the digital age [
10], these need to be linked to a more substantial interest in the educational process and the many philosophical strands associated with it. If this is not done, EE and ESD research could become a “large fish in a small pond” ([
10], p. 17). In addition to pushing our own field, we also need to acknowledge our interdependence with other fields focusing on the individual, the social and nature, and benefit from and contribute to them—in other words try to avoid getting stuck in our little pond and now and then join the other fish in the lake.
We begin this paper by reporting on our personal experiences attending two conferences in 2011 and 2012 and comparing these experiences with earlier observations made in the 1990s. We do not provide proof of a development within the field, but illustrate, in two case studies, what appears to us to be an alarming tendency at ESE conferences. By focusing on the two conferences and drawing on experiences from the early 1990s, we emphasize that there seems to be long-term tendencies to neglect the educational “E” in conference presentations. The aim of this introduction is therefore to ask why centuries of work within the field of educational philosophy is so often forgotten and what this work might teach us.
2. Conference Experiences
The first conference we report on is the 11th Invitational Seminar on Environmental Education Research, held in Melbourne, Australia, in 2011, with the theme “Positioning Environmental Education Research for 2015 and Beyond: Knowledge Value and Integrity, Intergenerational and Globalization Issues”. One aim of the seminar was to set the agenda for ESE research after the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) 2005–2014 [
11]. During the seminar, a variety of important discussions took place on subjects such as the scope of the research area, the contextualization of new research, journal editors’ understandings of the field, organizational structures for new researchers and a common desire to expand theoretical underpinnings.
In one of the seminars, the task was to answer the question: “If I were to give you 60 seconds to describe the really hot topics in EE research in the next 5–10 years, what would top your list?” Many of the comments and ideas written up on the twelve resulting flip charts (all of which were photographed without names or possible identification and, as we did not participate in the seminar, we have no idea about who wrote what), are worth considering. These included: “the need to create small epistemic communities to handle the global challenges which are big and often make people feel fear”, “the field has been too focused on school-based education” and “good work has been done related to critical pedagogy”. Many of the comments related to specific outcomes such as: “ecological outcomes in urban settings”, “behavior outcome and long-term behavior outcome”, “develop ecological identity”, “we have the science of sustainability but we are not doing it”, “how can we be an activist field, in terms of making concrete difference in our field?”, “they (critical of researchers in EE) ought to have had the ambition to take greater risks and make a greater impact”. Overall, these comments and questions represent normative views of the tasks of future environmental education research. There is often an outspoken desire that we should achieve concrete and rapid changes in everyday practices through education.
The desire for social change seems to be strong in Education in general, and is clearly visible in discussions about the future of the research area. In light of the rich and varied body of educational philosophy, this activist “change attitudes” approach can appear rather crude. The understandable urge to simplify the challenges and methods should always be accompanied by a focus on the need to “complicate the field” and take the continuum of perspectives seriously [
12]. Our overall impression was that the people attending the Invitational Seminar were good and passionate researchers. However, we also observed that the hot topic exercise revealed some of the normative tendencies that have been present in the research area for a long time. The exercise of jotting down a few keywords may in itself have led to normative expressions; something that researchers perhaps should be more aware of. Fast and “effective” solutions that identify “what works” can lead to mis-education.
The second conference experience that we would like to mention is the environmental education special interest group (SIG) at the AERA Conference held in 2012 in Vancouver, Canada. Some of the sessions were strongly focused on research and its theoretical and philosophical ties, while others included presentations that were more loosely connected to research. Several of the presentations that we attended were not properly contextualized in ESE research and had very few, if any, connections to educational philosophy. This could have been compensated for by including elements of critical reflection on the results and consequences of the topic aired. Some of the presentations were very normative and highlighted the results to be used in practice in a way that could be categorized as “mis-educative” [
13]. The recommendations were targeted at different levels of society, for example teachers/educators at classroom level and stakeholders at policy level. Our overall impressions of the EE SIG presentation were favorable, though, in that it had a lot of interesting and compelling examples of good research. However, the tendency to present “quick fixes” or fast solutions and change practices was also evident.
Research often focuses on specific goals that are beyond the actual educational situation. The normative “change attitude” approach becomes problematic if ESE researchers want to establish connections to the broader field of pedagogical research. At the AERA Conference EE SIG workshop, some of the presentations demonstrated a lack of research contextualization, a lack of basic knowledge about educational theories and, last but not least, an almost total absence of humility regarding other people’s ideas about productive approaches to environmental and sustainability matters. Such a lack of contextualization could result in ham-fisted recommendations being advanced, with little room for continued input from and sympathy with other ideas, practices and theories.
The Lack of Educational Philosophy and Simplistic Views of the Role of Education
The primary aim of these two conferences was to focus on research. In this respect, the appearance of normative statements about what is right and wrong came as something of a surprise. However, in the first two examples from the research conferences, the lack of focus on educational philosophy was worrying. Over twenty years ago, Jickling [
3] had a similar experience in an EE research seminar in North America:
The first concern arises from my observations of the research seminar held during National Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)'s 1990 conference held in San Antonio. Amid discussions about quantitative, qualitative, and action research, talk about philosophical analysis was conspicuous by its absence. The lack of attention to educational philosophy, and the research methods employed by philosophers, has been an impediment to the development of environmental education. This is a matter of considerable importance.
This excerpt is an important starting point for our call to EE researchers, because it articulates worries about the future development of the research area. In order to make educational theory approaches more visible and diverse, as requested by Hart and Nolan [
14], Rickinson [
15] and Östman [
16], all research articles might include a paragraph that illustrates which philosophical traditions they are inspired by and build on.
A relation to pedagogy makes philosophical insights important for EE researchers, although educational philosophy alone is not enough. As one philosopher put it: “I'm a philosopher by trade and philosophers rarely write really useful books” [
17]. EE researchers want to make a difference—but should not try to achieve this in an undemocratic way.
One of the authors of this paper describes the grounding principle of his work as research with a (postmodern) post-structuralist-pragmatist perspective, while the other terms his approach speculative-realist. But these labels are not intended to limit or polarize our approaches. Rather, identifying our general approaches is a way of understanding and criticizing our own theoretical and philosophical habitus and hopefully continuing to develop our work. Whether deliberate or not, all research has some form of philosophical vantage point, which in turn is highly influenced by geographical and historical backgrounds. A simplistic description of early EE would arguably name psychology and a focus on behavioral outcomes as major sources of inspiration. This continues to be an important part of the ESE research tradition in the USA and other countries. In Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, sociology has been influential, while the French have favored their own philosophical traditions. Scandinavia has at least two ESE research traditions. The first is rooted in German psychological traditions and is closely related to the continental concept of “didactics”. Didactics is an academic discipline in its own right and is in English either called education or curriculum studies. A second tradition is connected to early sociology and inspired by Dewey’s focus on the “socio-cultural”. When researchers meet at conferences, these different traditions often “confront” each other, although this is not always a problem. What can be a problem is when we as researchers are not aware of or explicit enough about the educational and philosophical assumptions of our ESE research. Difficulties can arise from ESE researchers who have specific ecological positions and consider education as a tool with which to achieve specific long-term ecological and/or societal goals.
The field of EE research is approaching its fiftieth anniversary while educational philosophy is often considered to have begun with Plato’s work more than two thousand years ago [
18]. The specific areas of interest of ESE research could thus benefit from centuries of ideas and theories about the role of education.
7. Conclusions
Many EE/ESD researchers are educators with an interest in environmental issues, and some are also members of environmental NGOs. However, the personal connection to these important issues could blur the fine line between educator/researcher/activist. The results of an individual’s work could become too goal-oriented and focus on changes in practice, which in turn could make recommendations normative and prescriptive. By asking questions about educational practices, and even bad practices, with starting points in educational philosophy, there will be better chance of the “E”, Education in ESE, being prioritized, rather than the activist state of mind of “taking action now”. At present, a great deal of what is called EE/ESD research does not adequately deal with “E” in conference presentations. This makes a call for more focus on the “E” necessary, together with the importance of linking to educational philosophy in order to ensure progressive research that draws on the work of the present and the past. We would like to stress that we truly believe that a stronger connection to educational philosophy could strengthen discussions about the purpose and role of education in the ESE research area. This could make the small “pond”, that at times seem to restrict our movements, bigger and help to clear-up the “muddle” that was recognized in the early 1990s [
3]. “New fish” from other parts of educational research might populate the pond and add or contribute to the on-going process of generating new knowledge in the ESE research area. These “fish” might come from the fields of social justice, intercultural education research, human/child rights research or the myriads of other interesting fields that work with the question—what is education for? We do not see any drawbacks in the field having closer ties with the established field of educational philosophy, because our own research and work could be strengthened by a more intimate relation with others navigating the educational field.
This inspirational example regarding “bad practice” will hopefully help ESE researchers to see the possible benefits of including more philosophical enquiries in their work. Are we in fact guilty of “false activities”, “pseudo activities” or even instilling a sense of meaning by repeatedly doing the same kind of research in similar ways? Are there tendencies towards “bad practice” in the ESE research area? In our view, collective research reflections would ensure that any “bad practices” in the ESE research area are better understood and perhaps turned into dynamic and constructive good practices.
Issues related to educational philosophy have remained largely unchanged since the NAAEE conference in San Antonio some twenty years ago. The purpose of this paper is therefore to appeal for critical reflections on possible “bad practices” in ESE research and to emphasize the vital importance of a more democratic and participatory ESE. Guidelines are already in place for the framing of research in order to avoid the contemporary problems of loose connections to educational philosophy and un-reflected normativity when discussing the consequences of research results. In short, EE and ESD should not risk being regarded as mis-educative.
This paper also raises questions as to why centuries of thinking about the role of education in educational philosophy are often forgotten in a new area like ESE research. As Dewey [
42] pointed out, philosophy should be used to support the discernment of practical problems:
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with problems of men. The elaboration through philosophical thoughts has to made through application to all the disciplines which have the intimate connection with human conduct: to logic, ethics, aesthetics, economics and the procedures of sciences formal and natural.
The ESE area is connected to research into human conduct at a personal lifestyle level and misconduct at a global environmental level. The discussions linked to human conduct from an environmental and climate perspective have a tendency to be normative and orientated towards changing individuals’ behavior. That this perspective has been far from successful is obvious when looking at the rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions and the increase in the number of environmental and climate challenges. Discussions with a greater link to the strong philosophical core of education could help ESE research to find alternative ways to that of normativity, and invite people to democratically participate in individual and global change.
We are quite comfortable about writing a somewhat normative paper about the need to develop a research and practice that is much less normative. A paper is, per se, normative. Here we have spoken “out loud” and hopefully shown, through the selected examples, our starting assumptions and intentions. Our desire for change is based on the need to connect research to educational theories, and thereby reduce the number of normative “activist” statements hitherto common in ESE research conference activities.