In response to environmental degradation, the Lesotho government, in collaboration with the Danish government, introduced an Environmental Education Support Project in schools in 2001. In order to optimise the achievement of the project goals the, Monitoring and Research Team was established to formatively evaluate the project as it unfolded. The principles of action research were to guide the monitoring process. The paper discusses the findings of the early phase of the monitoring process with reference to the project's epistemological commitment to initiate paradigmatic shift, in the context of conceptualizing environmental education and the associated learning theories and teaching approaches through workshops with relevant stakeholders in the school curricula development. It is illustrated that the workshops initiated cognitive tensions and shifts amongst the participants, and that their occurrence was indicative of the interrogation of the positivist paradigm underpinning the education system in Lesotho.