Environments, people and environmental education: a story of bananas, frogs and the process of change

Abstract

A story is used to address how the process of change has led to the development of political, social, economic and biophysical environmental stress. Comparative analogies illustrate how education as an institutional profession with an historically rooted didactic science perspective has not adequately responded to change, despite the emergence of both People's Education and Environmental Education as sensitising forums. The urgency for participatory engagement in meaningful change and the development of alternative perspectives of education are optimistically sketched as a possibility for reversing environmental degradation. To achieve this education should react both as an agency of change, and an agency that is changed by society. The profession must be equal to this dialectic challenge.