Environmental Education during and Post-COVID-19: Challenges and New Opportunities

Dear Colleagues,

Environmental education is “a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and its associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action.” (UNESCO & UNEP Tbilisi Declaration). Environmental education can take place in the formal education settings (schools and universities), and it can also occur informally with guidance from environmental educators, for example, citizen scientists. Different from other types of education, environmental education integrates field trips and sometimes laboratory classes into the teaching process.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented and multidimensional challenges to education systems and has had a particular impact on environmental education. Online or remote environmental education presents significant challenges, with new opportunities emerging simultaneously.  Students can no longer learn in the same ways as they did in the field, laboratory, and classroom, and they may struggle to adjust to virtual and asynchronous lessons. They also miss their social interactions with teachers and classmates. However, students also have more control over the lessons and may also enjoy the new-found flexibility of their learning. With new technologies, virtual field trips can provide students access to a variety of natural environments, with very little or no costs for travel and accommodation.

There is still a lack of information that looks broadly at the ways environmental education has adapted during the pandemic and what adaptions have been the most successful. Furthermore, it is important to explore which aspects of emergency remote teaching should remain in the next generation of environmental education in the post-COVID-19 era. This Special Issue is aimed at providing selected contributions on the advances made in the challenges and progress of environmental education both during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the post-COVID-19 era.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Field teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic;
2. Laboratory classes during the COVID-19 pandemic;
3. The conducting of environmental science/engineering dissertations during the COVID-19 pandemic;
4. Raising awareness of environmental problems during the COVID-19 pandemic
5. Environmental citizen science;
6. The incorporation of good lessons that have been learned during the pandemic and that can be implemented into environmental education in the post-COVID-19 era.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Hong Yang
Guest Editor

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• environmental education
• COVID-19 pandemic
• field class
• laboratory class
• online teaching
• dissertation
• environmental citizen science