In this commentary, we reflect on the articles in this special collection from our lens as scholars who have chosen to conduct research with a focus on climate change education. We start with statements of positionality, as certainly our own experiences and philosophical stances shape our work and reflections included here. Afterwards, we present…

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 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, 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…

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…

Environmental education is an important strategy in addressing environmental problems faced by communities around the world. In this article, the author particularly keen to know how the act of "doing research" will advance the field of environmental education and as such contribute to the solution of broader environmental problems. The author…

In this article, the author explores the different research approaches to the issues on "race/power/culture" with those of "action, experience, behaviour" and "technology" in the field of environmental education research. Here, the author suggests that environmental educators and researchers must be careful not to adopt an uncritical…

Explores the current status of the empirical-analytical methodology and its "positivist" ideologies in environmental education research through the critical analysis of three criticisms outlined in an article by Robottom and Hart. Suggests that the criticisms misrepresent empirical-analytical methodology in their dismissal of it as…

Critically analyzes some of the ways in which human subjectivity and agency are constructed in the contemporary discourse of environmental-education research. Suggests that methods of constructivist science-education research are not applicable to either subjects or subject matters of environmental education, and poststructuralist methodologies…

Examines the methodology and findings of the emergent environmentalism research project as reported in Environmental Education Research v4 n4. Challenges the ontological stance implicit in the research as well as explicit epistemology. (Author/CCM)

Assesses selected examples of research on significant life experiences. Compares the ways in which these studies use retrospective accounts of experience with autobiographical approaches to curriculum inquiry that have been informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics. (Author/CCM)