The present work attempts to empirically categorise the nature of the relationship between scientific knowledge and Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) through the study of published research articles, and to raise questions about companion categories associated with this relationship (Garisson et al. 2015).
How science knowledge is treated in relation to ESE underpins a range of epistemic assumptions. It is precisely the role of knowledge, its capacity for generalisation or its situatedness in relation to social and political action (or inaction) which we use to problematise and explore. Through analysis of the texts, we aim to theorise this relationship in terms of building and using knowledge. In so doing we invite attention to the problematic connection between scientific knowledge and ESE.
Within a prominent vision of the relationship between science education and ESE, scientific knowledge is seen as axiologically neutral and epistemically privileged. In that vision, science in the curriculum would be distinct and mono-disciplinary (Korfiatis 2005).
An alternative vision would encompasses the relevance of science to coping with everyday science-related situations, for example, in assessing whether to buy energy-saving light bulbs. While the focus of the prominent vision is on the core principles, laws and theories of science, the alternative vision contextualises science through the lens of everyday life and focuses on the interface of decision-making between scientific activity and everyday social and personal issues. While it enables the incorporation of social and environmental aspects it retains an essentialised notion of science as a discipline, and it is difficult to see how such a conceptualisation of the curriculum can be incorporated in, say, socially just decision-making. It assumes that scientific knowledge can be applied to environmentally complex decision-making which has been shown to be problematic (Lee & Roth, 2003) in that it needs, for example, to challenge particular notions of expertise through distributed knowledge.
Finally, a third vision could be one that, within the context of the risk society (Beck 1992), knowledge of environmental issues is inherently uncertain and environmental issues are seen as both political and social problems. Within that vision actions on the environment are not susceptible to technical fixes but need to be conceptualised as an interdisciplinary socio-political project in which the political nature of the scientific practise, research and production is exposed and critiqued.
From a pedagogical point of view, prominent approaches lend themselves to knowledge measurement because that knowledge is bounded and generalisable, hence constructs of that knowledge can be articulated. Knowledge which transcends disciplinary boundaries and is socially distributed (nearer to alternative visions) cannot be evaluated with the same positivist instruments. How the relationship between science knowledge and ESE is described is therefore likely to be entangled with broader constructs, for example, learning theories, the role of agency, as well as more foundational commitments of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. We suspect this relationship is complex, particularly in those texts which straddle the borders between different visions of ESE.
More specifically this study seeks to investigate the following questions:
What are the prominent visions of scientific knowledge in current ESE literature?
How this visions are associated with companion meanings such as an individualized vs a socially constructed type of knowledge; postivistics vs interpretivistic methodologies; fact-based vs normative vs pluralistic notions of knowledge?
