Education embracing the environment and nature

The practice and theory of education have increasingly been drawn to the notion that the environment and nature, as our surrounding world, are undergoing environmental devastation. To engage students in a more-than-human world shall be seen as one of the aims of education and be taken into consideration for educational practice and policy-making. Education in contemporary times is not only about an individual’s acquisition of sound knowledge, skills, characters and attitudes to be a citizen of a society but also about being a part of the more-than-human world where the value and interdependence of every member, human or non-human, can be recognised and regarded. Seeing non-human beings as our fellow-members and seeing ourselves as parts of the more-than-human world does not only challenge the established system of knowledge but also puts into question the way we value, act and live our lives. In order to do so, we shall welcome and be open to new possibilities and opportunities of thinking, speculating and actions about nature and the environment. In this vein, this special issue of Policy Futures in Education seeks to challenge the boundaries of education in terms of the concern and care about the environment and nature. The approach to education concerning the environment and nature will be explored from three different but interrelated aspects: theoria, poeisis and praxis. This collection includes several interesting papers that embrace the environment and nature and that include insights on educational speculation, creation and transformation. The trio of theoria/speculation, poeisis/creation and praxis/action regarding the environment and nature may point towards an alternative approach to environmental education in terms of ideas and practice.

The first three articles articulate the first movement of the trio with great delicacy and criticality. The first paper Challenges of environmental problems to philosophy of education, by Morimichi Kato, examines the background of environmental crisis. Kato describes the environmental problem as a lifestyle-related disease, which has its historical origins in the advancement of technology in the Industrial Revolution and the dethronement of nature in the 17th-century when Descartes’ Meditations was published in 1628. The dethronement of nature, referring to the loss of nature’s ontological priority, resulted from the mechanical worldview and the esteem of mathematics as the best tool to penetrate the cosmos. Kato calls this shift as an epistemological turn. However, the epistemological turn does not mark an absolute rupture in the human understanding of nature; rather, it manifests an oscillation between two tendencies of conceptualisation of nature throughout intellectual history after this point: nature is taken as a mere object and still retains its ontological dignity. Such contradiction can be found in the work of many philosophers, like Kant, Comenius and Pestalozzi. Within the tension of these two poles, Kato proposes ‘an alternative ontology’ which consists of four features: the alternative ontology must be able (1) to weaken or breakthrough the ‘prison of mind’; (2) to resist foundationalism and fundamentalism; (3) to be attentive to the cultural aspect of nature and (4) to be concerned with the way of living in the real world.

The next piece, by Lynley Tulloch, complements the discussion and focuses on ideologies of nature including the ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘wilderness’. This paper begins with an overview of ideologies of nature, covering the natural Eden of the Judeo–Christian mythology, non-human nature as ‘brute matter’ or ‘intractable domain of utility and danger’, nature as a natural reality in the Enlightenment perspective and positivist view and nature as a social construction. Tulloch takes Cronon’s view that the natural world does exist but cannot be fully known by human beings. The way humans understand nature relies on the study of ‘how nature and economics as very real material process, interact in a dialectical fashion with ideas about nature’. Then Tulloch arrives at the starting point of the main argument of this article that a human is the conception of alienation from nature in the light of Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. Tulloch asserts that, for Rousseau as well as for Marx, human beings are ontologically natural and free and that human beings become human due to their alienation from nature. It seems contradictory, since Rousseau is one of the most significant romantics and naturalists, while Marx is one of the most influential materialist philosophers. However, Tulloch highlights the dialectical feature existing between nature and humans in the Marxist view. Taking Fromm’s notion, she argues that Marx sees a human and nature as a whole while capitalist exploitation separates the human–nature whole. Tulloch’s approach to the human–nature relationship echoes Kato’s in the sense that they both employ a binary way of thinking which has been articulated as ‘Arcadian’ and ‘imperialistic’—in Donald Worster’s (1985) term. The interesting nuance lies in the note of dialectics vibrating in Tulloch’s article. Spending paragraphs on the elaboration of the animist, ecofeminist and modernist rationalist ideologies of nature, this article in the final section concludes that to retrieve the harmony and wholeness between humans and nature, human beings should conceive a new geocentric or solar-ethical position to locate and imagine themselves.

Michael Bonnett, in his beautifully written article The powers that be: environmental education and the transcendent, argues that fundamental to the problem of environmental degradation is a deep-seated and increasing inability in western anthropocentrism that, proceeding from the European Enlightenment, has conditioned our understanding of the environment and the human–nature relationship. He points out with much perceptiveness that the core to the current environmental predicament is the modernist humanism and scientism, which separates a human from nature by privileging abstract ideation over concrete experience. In order to be disentangled from the bonds of thought, as Bonnet suggests, we have to reconceive and retrieve the senses of the transcendence of nature. The transcendence of nature resides in various qualities including the inherent otherness, inherent mysteriousness and integrity that have the power to shape the human perception, understanding and existence and in so doing link a human to the cosmos as a whole.

Following Bonnett’s paper is the piece Environmental education, Heidegger and the significance of poetics, authored by Ruth Irwin, which shows sympathetic sentiments with the previous papers. This paper pursues the awareness of being and the receptivity of the earth in the Heideggerian poetic way. Irwin points out that, according to Heidegger, at the heart of environmental problems lie the subject–object dualism and separation with the aid of idealism and technological enframing (Gestell). The western idealism prioritizes individual reason to the objective nature. Modern technology exacerbates the privileged status of human beings in the world and takes nature as a resource for human use and exploitation. Somehow, the subject–object dualism and the technological enframing blind human beings to consumerism, nihilism and the forgetting of being. The way out of this modernist, consumerist danger is to re-engage us ‘with the task of what it is to be human—relating to beings as a whole’ through language—especially poetics, for language works as the ‘house of being’; furthermore, ‘poetics is the appropriation of everyday meanings and in the strange apartness of new, conceptual illumination, in the lived environment and sharing through language’. The poetry of Trakl, Rilke and Höderlin pertinently and delicately expresses what Heidegger means with the ek-static poeisis through which human beings are able to return to the earth and to dwell among the animals of nature.

For educational researchers and practitioners embracing the environment and nature, how to embody the environmental concern in educational praxis is one of the tasks ahead. The next two papers will engage readers in education with environmental regard. For Tina Evans, sustainability education is one of the keys to confront the crisis. Concerning the economic and socio-political configurations in relation to sustainability, she asserts that sustainability as transdisciplinary praxis is a unity of theory, practice and reflection. Sustainability education then has to be seen as a teaching/learning process based on transdisciplinary collaborations. Putting the focus on the higher education setting, Evans discusses the challenges to transdisciplinary sustainability education and suggests various means for fostering collective learning and collaborations among faculty members such as developing a shared vision, engaging with values, working with generative themes, developing transdisciplinary identity and competence, creating a safe space for learning and teaching and highlighting the role of generalists. Overall, the influential factors that Evans reveals as playing an important role in impeding and constructing transdisciplinary collaborations for sustainability education deserve a place in developing educational strategies for confronting sustainability crisis.

With regard to environmental education, David A. Greenwood and R. Justin Hougham highlight the issue of technology that is unavoidable for contemporaries. At the beginning of their paper Mitigation and adaptation: critical perspectives towards digital technologies in environmental education, Greenwood and Hougham pose a very good question to the readers: what and how can children develop the wonder of or intimacy with nature when they spend all of their time online with portable technical devices like iPads or laptops rather than going into nature to have direct sensory experiences? Their examination of the omnipresence of mobile digital technology in relation to education in the first section rings the alarm that computer-mediated experience dominates the process of learning and teaching and thereby patters the relationship between humans and the environment in every aspect. However, far from being technophobic, Greenwood and Hougham suggest that we take the position of critical embracement of technology. They believe that the use of technology in a ‘good’, ‘limited’ way could enhance place-conscious environmental learning and create new possibilities and opportunities. By taking this position, they propose several mitigation and adaptation strategies, which show promise for deepening place-consciousness and environmental education. These strategies are as follows: reducing the use of digital tools; critically evaluating and using such tools in ways that enhance and extend, rather than limit or distort, direct, unmediated experience; increasing ecological literacy and pro-environmental behaviours; embracing learner-centred pedagogy; tracking digital trails; engaging with places through Geographic Information System (GIS); participating in environmental monitoring projects; developing digital storytelling skills; and learning about distance places. According to Greenwood and Hougham, the appropriate mitigation and adaptation of technologies with criticality show great potential to environmental education and place-conscious learning. In spite of the optimism towards technologies, underpinning the strategies are two very interesting concepts of technofasting and slow pedagogy that paradoxically manifest the significance of the ‘suspension’ of digitalised mediated technologies in learning.