- Title
- Working outside the square within: A history of Environmental Education Centres within the NSW Department of Education (1970-2017)
- Creator
- Ross, Anne Marie
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Environmental education began in the late 1960s to early 1970s. At the same time, the NSW Department of Education started establishing field studies centres, later known as environmental education centres. They started developing and disseminating environmental education. Evolving from nature study and conservation education, environmental education crucially encompasses an action component of being “for” the environment as well as “about” and “in” the environment. The environmental education centres have embodied and encompassed that evolution. Antithetical to traditional forms of formal education, environmental education incorporates an intrinsically holistic, socio-political character. Centre environmental educators are unique professionals within the state education workforce who provide both a relevant connection between land, water and pedagogy, and essential support for educating for sustainability. Within this context, there are lessons to be learnt about the vagaries of the state political system and how environmental education centre personnel implemented change within that system. Over the last 20 or so years, many key environmental educators from within the NSW environmental education centre system have retired. Many of these people were very experienced within the environmental education centre network and were instrumental in progressing the development of environmental education/education for sustainability and the work of the centres within NSW. With history informing how things play out in the present day, it seems an important time to study the history of environmental education in NSW. This historical analysis narrates the establishment and development of these centres, and environmental education/education for sustainability, through the phenomenon of the 1970s growth in socially conscious governance, to the public managerialism of the 1980s and 1990s, into the tightening tentacles of neoliberalism. With an action-oriented ethos, the centres have made a significant contribution to shifting the agenda toward a more sustainable future, connected to our environment relative to a world heavily influenced by our consumeristic society.
- Subject
- Environmental Education Centres (EECs); Field Studies Centres (FSCs); environmental education; educating for sustainability (EfS); connected learning; effecting change; enablers; inhibitors; pedagogy; curriculum
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1415674
- Identifier
- uon:36934
- Rights
- Copyright 2020 Anne Marie Ross
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 172 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |