EfS in Australia: Reviewing the state of play

Annette GoughRMIT Universityand Noel GoughUniversity of Canberra

Outline

EfS in formal school education EfS research

The Decade in Australia

Department of the Environment and Heritage as host

Slow beginning Confusion between ESD and EfS and EE Generally still seen as “Education for

Environmental Sustainability” with silences around the (UN DESD) social and economic pillars of ESD

Australian Government Implementation Strategy for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

A primary aim of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) is to build an awareness and understanding of the principles and goals of education for sustainable development.At a national level there will be opportunities for partnerships and the sharing of information. To ensure any national initiatives are responsive to community needs it is not intended that a full list of activities for the ten-year period be developed at the commencement of the DESD. Instead involvement is more likely to entail a rolling program of activities with projects considered on an annual basis, in line with continuing evaluation and opportunity identification, thus building on the initiatives of each year.Some longer-term goal setting may also be possible. An example being the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative, where the aim might be to implement the Initiative in a significant proportion of Australian schools.

continuedIn line with the UNESCO Implementation Scheme, the Australian Government will be looking to opportunities for building capacity and the mainstreaming of Education for Sustainability considerations through strategies such as:

developing and expanding existing Australian Government policies and programs in education for sustainability;

promoting and sharing successful Australian initiatives and expertise in education for sustainability;

inviting national and international partnerships to strengthen and re-orientate policies and programs; and

undertaking a gap analysis and evaluation of work to date. Activities will be developed in conjunction with the National Environmental Education Council and other stakeholders as the DESD progresses. Beyond the activities of the Australian Government, stakeholders from across business, government and the community are encouraged to work towards a common vision of a sustainable Australia.

National Action Plan – a review

National Environmental Education Council National Environmental Education Network Australian Environmental Education

Foundation – funded as Australian Research Institute in Education for Sustainability (ARIES) at Macquarie University

Environmental Education Grants program

ARIESCompleted Projects Sustainable Schools - International Perspective Education for and about Sustainability within Australian Business Schools Industry Sustainability Research Program Development Forums Current Projects A National Review of Environmental Education and its Contribution to

Sustainability in Australia Education for and about Sustainability within Australian Business Schools

- Stage 2 Industry Sustainability - Stage 2 Reef Water Quality Protection Plan - Scoping of Issues Associated with

Industry Practices Air Quality Education - Effective Programs Development of a Tool for Assessing Provision and Effectiveness of

Coastal Management Education Building Government Capacity Towards Sustainability A Review of models for professional development in pre-service teacher

education

Education for a sustainable future

A national statement on environmental education for schools

Published in July 2005 Distributed to all schools with letter from state

Departments of Education Attributed to DEH but not DEST No mention of NEEC except as Committee

chair Tensions and issues Politics

Issues Implementing ESD in schools involves approaches to

teaching and learning that integrate goals for conservation, social justice, appropriate development and democracy into a vision and a mission of personal and social change. It also involves developing the kinds of civic virtues and skills that can empower all citizens and, through them, our social institutions, to play leading roles in the transition to a sustainable future.

These are the challenges for implementing ESD in schools, curriculum and instruction. Much work is need in pre-service and in-service teacher education, in institutional reform and in curriculum materials to build an understanding of ESD in its breadth, which takes it beyond current conceptions of EE.

Sustainable Schools

Sustainable Schools in Victoria, Australia, is designed to provide an holistic education program for schools on sustainability.

The program is a framework or guided process for facilitating cultural and behavioural change towards sustainability in schools.

Sustainable schools has gone national in 2005.

Won national Eureka Prize in 2005.

Ten step plan

1. Make a commitment, form a committee/ working group

2. Adopt a whole school approach, involving students

3. Conduct an audit4. Write a policy5. Set targets

continued6. Prepare an action plan:

Operations Curriculum Whole school involvement

7. Write curriculum plan, integrating operations

8. Implement the program9. Monitor, evaluate and provide

feedback10. Achieve goals and targets,

continuous improve program.

The Sustainable Schools Process

A whole school approach

Whole school characteristics that promote ESD are: policies

coherence

transparency

practice

continuing professional development

evaluation

School achievements

Economic outcomes Educational outcomes Environmental

outcomes Social outcomes

Economic outcomes Savings from reduced water consumption (by

having gardens rather than lawns and through using stored water for garden use).

Savings from reduced amount of waste sent to landfill (using fewer commercial skips).

Savings from reduced power consumption (through a “lights off” competition).

Potential income from running excursions into the school for other schools to learn about the wetlands.

The chickens pay for themselves through egg sales. The school sells the vegetables produced in the

vegetable garden.

Educational outcomes Students are actively involved in learning about the environment. Students learning has been enhanced through an action based

cross curricula project. There is a richer curriculum with hands on activities across all

Key Learning Areas. Students have been involved in data collection, mapping and

tabulation, as well as refining of scientific analysis, evaluation and testing techniques.

Students have opportunities to become aware, passionate and enthusiastic about the environment.

Improved student presentation skills. Improved student leadership skills. School has a community education role – home management

plans help parents be more environmentally friendly. Modelling water conservation principles to the community. Wetlands are used as a teaching resource with integrated units

from P-6.

Educational outcomes The children are excited and motivated by the program. The children have a more positive attitude to schooling. The environment has been used to link and drive literacy,

numeracy and boys issues. There has been skills development in literacy for boys. Environmental education has been incorporated across the

curriculum and across age groups Increased student interest in schooling. Problem children can be diverted to hands on garden activities. Students have learned the skills to plant plants properly and have

engaged in community plantings. The rice paddy will support the Indonesian language program. The animals and vegetable patch programs have provided an

additional site for the integration program. The local nature reserves are incorporated into school programs.

Environmental outcomes Enhanced biodiversity on the school site. Extensive waste recycling in the school – paper, plastic,

food scraps, garden waste. School grounds development. Monitoring and management of immediate coastal

environment. Reduction of school water consumption. The school has environmentally minded gardeners who

work in with the worm farms and composting. Propagation of local indigenous plants for local needs. There is an indigenous plant nursery on site which has

increased its partnerships with the community and government groups.

Water quality improvement of Jawbone Marine Sanctuary.

Environmental outcomes Through the Growling Grassfrog program students are

contributing to a national database on this species. The aesthetics of the school grounds. Stormwater collected by rainwater tank and used in wetlands

and/or vegetable gardens and/or toilets. Re-establishment of the vegetable gardens. Student write water saving hints for the school newsletter. Students have produced a drain stencilling brochure. The frog ponds are fed by stormwater and thus prevent loss to

the system. There are indigenous plants and a bush tucker garden. Food scraps are used in the worm farm and the compost is used

on the gardens. 50% reduction in landfill waste – much of which is providing food

for hens and worms.

Social outcomes Students, staff, community and experts have been involved in

the program and have ownership of it. Partnerships have been developed with the community, such as

links with local environmental and community groups, parents and projects.

Increased student leadership and social responsibility, self esteem, a sense of belonging and ownership.

Modelling of stormwater practices to the community through the visibility of the large water tank and rainwater fed toilet system.

Community involvement in planning and creation of the wetlands.

Student involvement in the community such as revegetating sand dunes.

Students are more confident and enjoy group work in the garden (building social capital).

Students have positions of responsibility and have become community environmental watchdogs (e.g. monitoring household garden watering against restrictions)

Social outcomes Parents are taking on sustainability practices at home

(e.g. waste free lunches) and are involved in many aspects of the school’s sustainability program.

Students work as Stormwater Ambassadors working with the local council Stormwater Officer.

Mentoring of young students. Access to the oval for disabled students following

stormwater retention work has been greatly appreciated. Student absences have declined, and behaviour has

improved. The whole school community has pride in the school. There is not a lot of vandalism and very little garden

damage. The animals program has provided an additional venue

for student activities at lunch time.

Other outcomes include: School infrastructure is used as an on-going educational tool and

resource for the teaching of sustainable principles, water consumption and management, and ecological interrelationships

Sustainable Schools initiative is embedded in their school operations and curriculum across all Key Learning Areas

Teachers have developed new pedagogical skills and knowledge The whole school community has developed new ways of working

together engaging student learning involving students in working towards a sustainable future developing extensive links with their local (and often broader)

communities high staff and student morale in the school establishing a basis for future development as a Sustainable

School and model for others.

Success factors Broad ownership of and engagement with

Sustainable Schools across the school.

Teachers, students and parents share the vision of the environment having a high profile in the school.

Support of the school leadership team.

Enthusiastic and committed staff.

Immersion of all staff in the Core unit.

The structure of Sustainable Schools made it easy to implement.

More success factors Integrating sustainability into school

operations and across the curriculum.

Student involvement in the day to day sustainability operations in the school.

The availability of funds to enable the development of visible sustainability infrastructure (such as rainwater tanks).

There is a school grounds master plan that helps bring together all aspects of achieving a Sustainable School.

Limiting factors (schools’ perspective)

Time Money The pressures of being

at the front Lack of models Lack of resources and

contacts

Limiting factors (researcher perspective)

Over confidence of process developers

Teacher understanding of education for sustainability

Systemic support Cost initially Competition from other

initiatives in schools Sustainability

The rest of the scene in Victoria – a work in progress

Education and Behaviour Change Strategy: Learning to Live Sustainably

Within the context of the Victorian Government’s Environmental Sustainability Framework

Facilitation of links between schools, home and communities

Developing support networks and structures Developing a communication strategy for

community education Audit of the wide range of resources and

support programs currently funded by DSE

Education Dept initiativesDE&T's Environmental Sustainability Strategy: The

Way Forward The key objectives of the strategy to meet

government targets include: strengthening governance and leadership for environmental

sustainability; implementing and learning from ‘Quick Wins’; integrating environmental sustainability into existing systems

and policies; increasing participation, engagement and achievement; enhancing people’s knowledge and skills in environmental

sustainability; and achieving sustainable financing and resourcing for

environmental sustainability actions.

Education Dept initiativesThe Office of Learning and Teaching's Sustainable

Schools Strategy 2005 The key components of the Sustainable Schools

Strategy 2005 are based on Pilot Program Evaluation Report and include:

Incorporating “sustainability” and “sustainability education” as significant overall criteria in the Strategic Partnership Program’s next three year funding round

Developing a training program for stakeholder agencies Developing a resource for use with pre-service teachers Support for the Dept’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy

to incorporate Administrative Guidelines. Support for development of school program indicators with

the Dept of the Environment and Heritage. Developing an evaluation and monitoring tool for schools to

use independently or as part of the review of their 4 year strategy plan.

Conclusion To date, much of the responsibility for EE has

been in science education and social studies ESD requires whole school, whole curriculum

transformation and different pedagogies ESD necessitates different ways of teaching,

different content and different school management skills for different learning

We need to start from what we are doing well and expand that base to take into account the other strategic perspectives of ESD

But do we know how to do this?

Informing education and learning: UNESCO DESD perspectivesSocio-cultural perspectives Human Rights Peace and human security Gender Equality Cultural Diversity and intercultural understanding Health HIV/AIDS GovernanceEnvironmental perspectives Natural resources (water, energy, agriculture, biodiversity) Climate change Rural transformation Sustainable urbanization Disaster prevention and mitigationEconomic perspectives Poverty reduction Corporate responsibility and accountability Market economy

Developing the global dimension in the school curriculum (DfES 2005)

Global citizenship: Knowledge, skills and understanding of concepts and institutions necessary to become informed, active citizens.

Conflict resolution: The nature of conflicts, their impact and the need for their resolution and the promotion of harmony.

Diversity: Understanding and respecting differences and relating these to our common humanity.

Human rights: Knowing about human rights including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Interdependence: How people, places, economies and environments are all inextricably interrelated.

Social justice: The importance of social justice as an element in sustainable development and the improved welfare of all.

Sustainable development: The need to maintain and improve the quality of life now without damaging the planet for future generations.

Values and perceptions: Critical evaluation of representations of global issues and the effect these have on people’s attitudes and values.

Re-orienting education for ESD: perennial problems

Programs about, in and for ESD for Pre-service teacher education In-service teacher education Training courses for Ministry of Education

managers Training courses for school principals New curriculum resources

Support for school initiatives so they can become Sustainable Schools and models for their communities

The challenges

Are the exhortations of the Decade any different from those from earlier UNESCO-UNEP declarations and reports?

Will the outcomes be different this time?

What will be different this time? Why?

For more information

Department of the Environment and Heritage – Environmental Education (including national statement):www.deh.gov.au/education

Sustainable schools documents: www.gould.vic.edu.au and www.gould.org.au

Victoria’s Environmental Sustainability Framework: www.dse.vic.gov.au

EE/Esf/ESD research in Australia EE/Esf/ESD research in Australia (not a playful state):(not a playful state):

• Descriptive (‘scoping’) studies and exhortations

• Technical/practical action research aimed at producing practitioner ‘fidelity’ with predetermined (and taken-for-granted) understandings of EE/EfS/ESD

For example (from a recent manuscript on strategies for sustainability at Australian universities submitted to AJEE):• EfS is ‘still an evolving concept’ (p. 2)

• ‘it is not obvious that any of the institutions surveyed has a definite understanding of… [EfS]’ (p. 6)

• EfS ‘continues not to be well understood’ or ‘fully implemented’ (p. 8)

• authors implicitly position themselves on a moral high ground in pointing to deficits in others’ understandings

• cliches such as ‘understanding the holistic nature of [EfS]’ don’t help: who does ’understand’ this and how would they/we know?

Much EE/EfS/ESD research is directed towards an instrumental interest in the effectiveness of interventions. Many interpretive/critical/deconstructive research questions are not being asked, e.g.:

• How are the desirable, undesirable and unintended effects of EfS distributed (in terms of class, gender, race, ethnicity, location – urban/rural, North/South)?

• How is EfS implicated in new forms of empire – not only US economic/military imperialism (even the US has ever-diminishing powers to regulate the flows of capital, technologies and people across national boundaries) but also the ‘sovereignty’ constituted by the many and various amorphous series of regulations and shared processes that exceed the mandates of nation-states and determine the rules for incorporating numerous institutions and peoples into ‘empires of the mind’?

Ecopolitics and empireEcopolitics and empire‘Environmentalists have long bemoaned the damage done by what is frequently termed “the domination of nature.” Once one asks the simple geographical question “what is the geography of the domination of nature?” the answer fairly quickly reveals itself as the history of colonization and imperialism. Ironically environmentalists who wish to ease the burden of that domination have frequently promoted the establishment of protected spaces, parks and the control of populations in manners that nonetheless replicate the practices of empire’ (Simon Dalby 2004).

The The cconsumption of exotic landscapesonsumption of exotic landscapes

• Safaris and game reserves, hunting trophy animals in exotic environments were all part of the imperial experience for colonial administrators.

• Conservation has its roots in imperial administration of resource production and in debates over botanical gardens, zoos, game reserves etc.

• An imperial mentality manages the rural according to urban and metropolitan criteria.

• Environmentalism is often an aesthetic politics that emphasizes the visual appeal for visitors rather than the practicalities of earning a livelihood for local inhabitants, who have often been forcibly removed from parks and reserves to ‘preserve’ them (Matthew, Halle and Switzer 2002).

Meteorology and empireMeteorology and empireIn providing preliminary evidence of what was only much later understood to be the El Nino Southern Oscillation phenomenon, 19th century meteorological science charted a picture of a cruel and unpredictable nature that could easily be blamed for famine in various parts of the world. Nature as precarious and fickle let European imperial grain merchants off the hook for the disruptions to the global patterns of food production that were a major contributing cause to the famines (Mike Davis 2001).

Deregulating EE/EfS/EE researchDeregulating EE/EfS/EE research

• John Law on methodology and mess• Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy

An example of work in progressAn example of work in progressGough, Noel. (in press). Geophilosophy and methodology: science education research in a rhizomatic space. In Vithal, Renuka, Setati, Mamokgethi and Malcolm, Cliff (eds) Title tba (UNESCO-SAARMSTE book project on methodologies for researching mathematics, science and technological education in societies in transition)

Figure 1: ‘If this is an awful mess… then would something less messy make a mess of describing it?’ (illustration inspired by – and caption quoted from – John Law, 2003, pp. 2-3)

Methodology and mess• When I thought about what the editors of the UNESCO-

SAARMSTE book invited authors to do – to focus on the challenges for developing research methodologies that are appropriate and relevant to societies undergoing major changes, especially characteristic of the ‘developing world’ – I imagined a mess (Figure 1 is my attempt to represent this mess).

• Developing ‘a scholarship in research that is responsive and relevant to rapidly changing educational environments that are fraught with deep inequalities, diversity, conflict and instability’ means developing methodologies for knowing mess that helps us to understand the politics of mess and messiness.

• My mess is made from samples of texts (in the broadest sense of the term) that represent some of my understandings of the inequalities, diversities, conflicts and instabilities that constitute science education and research in regions such as southern Africa.

Methodology and mess• Law (2003) asserts that:

– ‘the world is largely messy’ – ‘contemporary social science methods are hopelessly bad at

knowing that mess’– ‘dominant approaches to method work with some success

to repress the very possibility of mess’

• Law invites us to imagine method more imaginatively, to imagine what method might be ‘if it were not caught in an obsession with clarity, with specificity, and with the definite’

• Law argues that social science inquiry is mostly ‘a form of hygiene’

Methodological hygeineDo your methods properly. Eat your epistemological greens. Wash your hands after mixing with the real world. Then you will lead the good research life. Your data will be clean. Your findings warrantable. The product you will produce will be pure. Guaranteed to have a long shelf-life. So there are lots of books about intellectual hygiene. Methodological cleanliness. Books which offer access to the methodological uplands of social science research…In practice research needs to be messy and heterogeneous. It needs to be messy and heterogeneous, because that is the way it, research, actually is. And also, and more importantly, it needs to be messy because that is the way the largest part of the world is. Messy, unknowable in a regular and routinised way. Unknowable, therefore, in ways that are definite or coherent… Clarity doesn’t help. Disciplined lack of clarity, that may be what we need (Law 2003).

Methodology and mess• In After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Law

(2004) elaborates upon this argument at much greater length.

• Law does so in his own way, drawing on his immersion in the discourses of actor-network theory (ANT) and its successor projects.

• I also find ANT to be very generative in thinking about methodology but my current preference is to engage messy and heterogeneous objects of inquiry through the frames and figurations provided by Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘geophilosophy’, especially their concepts of rhizome, nomad and mots d’ordre.

Why geophilosophy?• In What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari (1994) map the ‘geography of reason’ from pre-Socratic times to the present, a geophilosophy describing relations between particular spatial configurations and locations and the philosophical formations that arise therein.

• They characterise philosophy as the creation of concepts through which knowledge can be generated.

• This is very different from the approaches taken by many analytic and linguistic philosophers who are more concerned with the clarification of concepts.

• Deleuze and Guattari created a new critical language for analysing thinking as flows or movements across space.

• Concepts such as assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight, nomadology, rhizome/rhizomatics and mots d’ordre (‘order-words’) refer to spatial relationships and to ways of conceiving ourselves and other objects moving in space.

• They distinguish ‘rhizomatic’ thinking from ‘arborescent’ conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations.

• ‘the rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space’ (Umberto Eco 1984)

Rhizomes and research• The space of educational research can be understood

as a ‘rhizome space’. • Rhizome is to a tree as the Internet is to a letter –

networking that echoes the hyper-connectivity of the Internet.

• The material and informational structure of a tree and a letter is relatively simple: a trunk connecting two points through or over a mapped surface.

• But rhizomes and the Internet (see figs. 2 and 3) are infinitely and continually complicating. They are irreducibly messy.

Losing the way: becoming nomadic in research

‘History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.

…nomads have no history; they only have a geography’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987)

I imagine nomadic wandering in the discursive fields of environmental education research as losing the way – as losing any sense that just one ‘way’ could ever be prefixed and privileged by the definite article. Like rhizomes, nomads have no desire to follow one path.

• In ‘Geophilosophy and methodology’ I demonstrate how thinking rhizomatically and nomadically destabilises arborescent and sedentary conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm and fixed foundations.

• I make a ‘mosquito-led rhizome’ from my readings of a Time magazine cover story about, and a school textbook account of, malaria – both of which occlude the complex, messy heterogeneity of the assemblage of parasites, mosquitoes, humans, technologies and socio-technical relations that malaria signifies.

• I make multiple, hybrid connections between these texts and others drawn from social/historical studies of science, SF (Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery, a mystery thriller in the SF sub-genre of alternative history) and SF criticism.

• Ghosh’s novel offers a speculative counterscience of malaria that connects with (but does not replicate) the ‘real’ history of Western medicine’s explorations of the disease and thus invites readers to think beyond the sign regimes of Western laboratory science.

What does ‘education for sustainable development’ do? A geophilosophical analysis of sustainability discourses in

international contexts

In preparation for Fields of Green: Philosophies of Educational Praxis (McKenzie, Bai, Hart, & Jickling, Eds.)

• explores some ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy might be used to analyse ESD in contemporary contexts of globalisation, multiculturalism and international communication networks, with particular reference to translating and/or interpreting ESD across national, linguistic and cultural borders

• uses their concept of mots d’ordre (order-words) to analyse selected examples of sustainability discourses in different nations

• analytic focus is not on what ESD means but on how it works and what it does or produces in specific locations