Victorian Sustainable Schools - Beyond Traditional Environmental Education
How can we have happier children in a better environment?
Twenty years of traditional Transmissive environmental education (focusing on teaching, communicating 'messages' and with external control) created greatly increased awareness. It did not result in long-term cultural change in our schools. However, the process of co-learning and transforming systems has redirected pedagogy to changing whole school behaviours. The cultural changes in schools has been amazing providing students with a more engaging and caring learning environment.
"... there is often little or no relationship between attitudes and or knowledge and behaviour."
Dr Doug McKenzie-Mohr (2002)
"Typically, issue awareness does not lead to behaviour in the environmental dimension."
Dr Harold Hungerford and Dr Trudi Volk (1990)
"... I came to see that the early assumption, shared by most people in environmental education, was a simplistic and deterministic one: that if people learnt about the environment issues, their behaviour would change. Not only does it not work, but too much environmental knowledge (particularly relating to the various global crises) can be disempowering, without a deeper and broader learning process taking place.">
Stephen Sterling, 2001
How Sustainable Schools is changing schools
| Figure 1: Traditional (transmissive) approach to environmental education |
Figure 2: Transforming systems |
| This diagram shows that in a typical school you may find small groups (environment club or a class) working on a sustainability activity, such as building a compost bin, but these activites are often conducted in isolation and their effects are usually only short-term. Meanwhile, the rest of the school is moving in the other direction of becoming less sustainable. |
In transformative education, all sectors of the school are involved in the change process and they all move in the same direction towards becoming more sustainable. In this case, there is a process of co-learning and a sense of ownership and empowerment. In schools where we have observed this happening, the change is a shift in the culture of the whole school community. This change has been shown to be long-lasting. |
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Sustainable Schools in action! Sustainable Schools helps schools develops a shared vision to drive learning and particpation by the whole school community.
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The Victorian Sustainable Schools pilot was developed and delivered by Gould League and CERES Community Environment Park with major funding support from the Federal Department of Environment and Heritage and additional funding provided by the Victorian Government and Philanthopric Trusts.