In exploring ways to respectfully include Indigenous Knowledges and pedagogies within environmental education programs, the challenge is to ensure strategies used will meaningfully support learning while reflecting local cultural traditions, languages, beliefs, and perspectives. In this paper, key components for science-based environmental…

Recent visions for environmental education now include a foundational acknowledgement that the well-being of humans and the environment are inseparable. This vision of environmental education, with a focus on interconnectedness as well as concepts of transformation, holism, caring, and responsibility, rooted in experiences of nature, community,…

Education has institutionalized a process that reifies cultures, ecological communities, and ultimately evolution itself. This enclosure has lessened our sensitivity to the pedagogical (eteragogical) nature of our lived relations with other people and with other living beings. By acknowledging that learning and teaching go on between species,…

This paper begins by suggesting that issues of social and ecological justice are not mutually exclusive. They are tied together through the logic of domination which is, in turn, sustained by oppositional value dualisms such man/woman, human/nature, and white/non-white. As such, we suggest that environmental education must deal with the shared…

This article provides an overview of the context, methodology, and theoretical framework of a research project conducted with coastal Newfoundland children living in communities deeply affected by the collapse of the marine ecosystem. Through a participatory engagement with bioregional poetry, the author investigates how children grow in their…

In an effort to figure out what it means to educate "ecologically," I decided to track down some of the stories that I was living, telling and making as an educator. I ended up lost in the house of environmental education, stuck within the rooms of ecological science and political advocacy. Outside on the lawn sat the story of place based…

This article explores the intersection of art education and place-based education as a means of developing ecological literacy. The author advocates the development of a model of place-based art education, one that integrates the real-world, community-centred learning of place-based education with the affective, subjective orientation of art…

This paper discusses the conceptual foundations for "Education for Sustainable Patterns of Living," the mission of the Center for Ecoliteracy in California. It offers an operational definition of ecological sustainability, and proposes study of living systems as a framework for understanding ecology. It considers key concepts for understanding…

This paper complements Fritjof Capra's paper in this issue, "Sustainable Living, Ecological Literacy, and the Breath of Life." It explores how concepts essential to ecological literacy can also guide strategies for overcoming barriers to introducing integrated, multidisciplinary pedagogy into school curricula. It examines how the crisis of…

The School of Outdoor Recreation, Parks and Tourism at Lakehead University offers a third-year course on ecological literacy. The course evolved from one with a predominant scientific approach to studying the bioregion to one that embraced a broader epistemological stance, giving greater authority, voice, and presence to nearby landscapes. This…

The vast majority of literature and practices in environmental education focuses on places and spaces. Little attention has been paid to time and temporalities as elements of environments, and the ways in which how we experience time affects our experience of place. This paper is an examination of the ways in which reflection on time can be…

Deep ecology arises from the personal intuition that one's self is part of the world's environmental wholeness. This awareness may be constructed upon scientific foundations but it is more commonly thought a spiritual concept. Deep ecology pedagogy emerges from its three-step process of ecological Self-realization. This paper traces the roots of…

Catholics increasingly appear to agree with the most passionate defenders of the environment. The ecological problem for Catholics is essentially moral: it comes down to respecting the value of life and the beauty of the cosmos, practicing meekness, and controlling one's desire for dominion. This point was stressed a great deal by John Paul II,…

In this narrative essay, I explore some fundamental assumptions in my understanding of environmental education. Questions are raised concerning the nature of perception, experience, and the interplay between the world and ourselves. The narrative is based on a recent trip down the Coppermine River in the Barrenlands of Canada's Arctic. The…

This paper describes an ecological framework for environmental education and uses the example of a recent summer institute for teachers conducted on "Haida Gwaii" to describe how the framework can be enacted. In our description, we use a narrative approach to "tell the story" of how this framework can organize experience with/in environmental…