Within the emerging field of research on education for sustainability (EfS), case studies are an important if not the predominant research approach, although often criticised for its lack of internal and external validity and a tendency to draw conclusions with insufficient rigour. While, basic concerns have been expressed and discussed in an…

This article discusses a narrative inquiry as a methodology for understanding and examining teachers' interpretations of their environment-related teaching experiences. Focusing on the value of teacher stories for interrogating the discursive practices of schools as institutional contexts, four main rhetorical themes are identified to illustrate…

This article is a transcript of the author's Keynote Address to the Fourth World Environmental Education Congress, Durban, July 2007. He has been asked to speak about environmental education research since Tbilisi, to explore what environmental education researchers might learn from this work, and look ahead to the challenges that now face them as…

Can we avoid inheriting serious issues from research related to environmental education when the researcher community is addressing education for sustainable development? This paper identifies and discusses three main issues: if an explicit and coherent concept of environmental education or education for sustainable development is missing; if the…

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions…

This study aimed to analyze environmental education research (EER) in Turkey conducted in Grades K-8 and published over the years 1997-2007. Due to the fact that there had been no systematic reviews of EER in Turkey prior to this time period, it was more appropriate to explore the implications of the results of this review for research policies…

Why do the designers of environmental education do what they do towards the environment through education? More importantly, how do they account for their design decisions (plans and actions)? Using the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis, we analyse environmental education designers' discourse in terms of the discursive…

This article uses a series of interlinked, personal vignettes to discuss the first three years of the North American Association for Environmental Education research symposium, from the perspectives of the key organizers. Seven challenges in the field of environmental education research are identified in a recent historical context, and we…

In this article we explore a number of issues arising from the papers in this special issue of "Environmental Education Research." The papers focus on current examples of childhood environment research in the UK together with research reviews from the UK, the US and Australia. In order to provide a framework for considering and contextualizing…

Numerous reports over recent years emphasise the importance of teamwork training in undergraduate programs in environment education at tertiary level. This paper describes a project undertaken by a team of final year undergraduate environment students from four faculties at RMIT University in Australia working on a multi-disciplinary environment…

In this article, the author argues for a central and critical role for "reflexivity in research" with the aim of developing and strengthening not only everyone's understanding of what everyone does in environmental education research, but also how, and why everyone does it. In a narrative account of methodological issues that occurred within, and…

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to methodological discourse about research approaches to environmental education. More specifically, the paper explores the current status of the "empirical-analytical methodology" and its "positivist" (traditional- and post-positivist) ideologies, in environmental education research through the critical…

In response to an invitation to explore the idea that potential guidelines be considered for qualitative inquiry in environmental education research, this article argues that prerequisite understanding of the nature and scope of qualitative inquiry required for such a task will reveal the problem inherent in it. Understanding the diverse…

In this article, the author discusses the implications of articles by Louise Chawla (1998) and Karen Malone (1999a) for "doing research." One of the most interesting implications of these two papers for environmental education research is the issues they raise about the challenges for environmental education researchers and education researchers…

In this article, the authors caution against blurring methods, methodologies and ideologies in research. They do this by drawing on two earlier articles in "Environmental Education Research" that focused on this issue as well but from quite different vantage points: Hart's (2000) paper in which he problematizes the generating of generic guidelines…