Environmental Learning
This book is about how school and university students experience and respond to learning activities concerned with environmental issues. While the learning demands associated with sustainable development become ever greater and more complex, our understandings of the nature and dynamics of such learning are in their early infancy. Environmental education and education for sustainable development have become features of many countries’ formal education systems, but very little is known about what such provision looks and feels like for the learners concerned. The aim of this book is to bring learners and their experiences to the centre of current debates about environmental education and education for sustainable development. By exploring the real-time actions, interactions and interpretations of individual learners in various environmental learning situations, we show how insights from research into the student experience can provide powerful pointers for future practice, policy and research. The last 4 decades have seen growing international recognition for the educational dimensions of environmental and sustainable development issues. Since the late 1960s, international statements from organisations such as the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) have called for environmental problems to be tackled through environmental education for all age groups. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm declared that: ‘education in environmental matters, for the younger generation as well as adults […] is essential’ (United Nation 1972).
