Environmental education research: will the ends outstrip the means?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank the authors for their contributions to this mini‐collection and, in particular, acknowledge the value and challenge that conversations with Phillip Payne, Mark Rickinson, Paul Hart, William Scott and Kelly Teamey have brought to this essay and the form and direction it has now taken over the course of its drafting. I only have myself to blame for the length and content of this essay. Notes 1. I have previously engaged some of these themes and those elsewhere in this essay in presentations to the 9th Invitational Seminar on Research Development in Environmental and Health Education, 'Addressing the challenges of the politics of research' (25–30 March 2007, Monte Verità, Switzerland), and the 7th Invitational Seminar, 'Enquiry in environmental and health education: critical issues of methodology and method', on the themes of 'Reflective professionalism in environmental and health education research' and 'Participatory and critical enquiry' (5–7 October 2003, Anchorage, Alaska). The essay also draws on material presented at the Annual Meeting of American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 11 April 2006, on 'What counts as quality in EEE research? Doctoral research on environmental education: Reflections and commentaries on current work', and to the UQAM conference, 'Key issues in environmental education research' (Montreal, 15 April 2005), gathered together around a presentation on the notion of researchers being, 'On comfortable, well worn bicycles and the need to change gears'. 2. Of course, these can equally be attributed to researchers, practitioners and the public. 3. The phrasing here draws on the OECD's Frascati Manual, and its definition of research, which also states that, in addition to the activity of people who are obviously engaged in research, research activity also includes: (i) the provision of professional, technical, administrative or clerical support and/or assistance to staff directly engaged in research; (ii) management of staff who are either directly engaged in research or are providing professional, technical or clerical support or assistance to those staff; (iii) activities of students undertaking postgraduate research courses; (iv) development of postgraduate research courses; and (v) supervision of students undertaking postgraduate research courses. 4. The whole set of WEEC 2007 proceedings should be available on the WEEC website, www.environmental-education.org, and the Southern African journal will publish a selected number of papers in a conference e‐book which will also be available online via the same site. The various Declarations and Reports of the UNESCO‐UNEP environmental education conferences are available online at www.tbilisiplus30.org. 5. For a more cautious position on this, see Reid et al. 2008 Reid, A., Jensen, B.B., Nikel, J. and Simovska, V., eds. 2008. Participation and learning: Perspectives on education and the environment, health and sustainability, Dordrecht: Springer. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Earlier drafts of some of the arguments therein were, in fact, presented and discussed at the WEEC in Torino. 6. Hannah Arendt (1958 Arendt, H. 1958. The human condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 51). 7. The examples and figures here draw heavily on Abraham (2008 Abraham, J. 2008. Politics, knowledge and objectivity in sociology of education: A response to the case for 'ethical reflexivity' by Gewirtz and Cribb. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(5): 537–48. 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