Clarifying environmental education: A search for clear action in southern Africa

Abstract

This research examines how environmental education has been conceived and enacted within the same orientations that have brought on many of the environmental issues that confront us in southern Africa today. It questions prevailing modernist positions which have assumed that providing 'nature experiences' and communicating 'conservation messages' will foster the change necessary to resolve environmental concerns. Local examples are used to reveal flaws in past strategies of rational intervention before further examples are used to suggest revised orientations. 'CLEAR' and 'ACTION' are then used as acronyms to clarify enhanced approaches that are emerging to address the challenges of the next decade. To meet these challenges, rational intervention strategies might well be displaced by interactive classroom and community orientations which set out to co-construct local agendas of issues for reflexive social processes of change.