EfS in Australia:
Reviewing the state of play
Annette Gough
RMIT University
and
Noel Gough
University of Canberra
Outline
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EfS in formal school education
EfS research
The Decade in Australia
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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
continued
In 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:
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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 reorientate 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
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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
ARIES
Completed Projects
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Sustainable Schools - International Perspective
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Education for and about Sustainability within Australian Business Schools
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Industry Sustainability
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Research Program Development Forums
Current Projects
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A National Review of Environmental Education and its Contribution to Sustainability
in Australia
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Education for and about Sustainability within Australian Business Schools - Stage 2
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Industry Sustainability - Stage 2
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Reef Water Quality Protection Plan - Scoping of Issues Associated with Industry
Practices
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Air Quality Education - Effective Programs
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Development of a Tool for Assessing Provision and Effectiveness of Coastal
Management Education
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Building Government Capacity Towards Sustainability
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A Review of models for professional development in pre-service teacher education
Education for a sustainable
future
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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
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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
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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 audit
4. Write a policy
5. Set targets
continued
6.
Prepare an action plan:
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Operations
Curriculum
Whole school involvement
7.Write curriculum plan, integrating
operations
8. Implement the program
9. Monitor, evaluate and provide feedback
10. 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
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Economic outcomes
Educational outcomes
Environmental outcomes
Social outcomes
Economic outcomes
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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)
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Time
Money
The pressures of being at
the front
Lack of models
Lack of resources and
contacts
Limiting factors
(researcher perspective)
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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
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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 initiatives
DE&T's Environmental Sustainability Strategy: The Way
Forward
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The key objectives of the strategy to meet government
targets include:
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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 initiatives
The Office of Learning and Teaching's Sustainable
Schools Strategy 2005
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The key components of the Sustainable Schools Strategy 2005
are based on Pilot Program Evaluation Report and include:
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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
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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 perspectives
Socio-cultural perspectives
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Human Rights
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Peace and human security
Gender Equality
Cultural Diversity and intercultural understanding
Health
HIV/AIDS
Governance
Environmental perspectives
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Natural resources (water, energy, agriculture, biodiversity)
Climate change
Rural transformation
Sustainable urbanization
Disaster prevention and mitigation
Economic perspectives
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Poverty reduction
Corporate responsibility and accountability
Market economy
Developing the global dimension in
the school curriculum (DfES 2005)
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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
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Programs about, in and for ESD for
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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
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Are the exhortations of the Decade any
different from those from earlier UNESCOUNEP declarations and reports?
Will the outcomes be different this time?
What will be different this time?
Why?
For more information
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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
(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 everdiminishing 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 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 consumption 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 empire
In 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 research
• John Law on methodology and mess
• Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy
An example of work in progress
Gough, 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 UNESCOSAARMSTE 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 hygeine
Do 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