This Virtual Land: Exploring Contexts and Methods of Online Environmental Adult Education (original) (raw)
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Networking the Natural: Environmental Adult Education in the Digital Age
As a field of practice, environmental adult education (EAE) must view online spaces as viable and meaningful sites of teaching and learning. As an integral part of the contemporary culture, online venues are highly occupied and utilized spaces of public, informal education. This paper explores how the participatory, creative, and critical methods associated with EAE can complement and enhance online spaces to foster socio-environmental transformation. If equipped with a critical consciousness, EAE can cultivate environmental “conscientization”, encourage alternative and empowering narratives to the dominant media messages of the environmental crisis, strengthen ecological identity, and foster environmental connection in online venues.
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As demands on the environment continue to intensify, it becomes increasingly urgent to act sustainably, responsibly and respectfully, to protect and restore environments. Digital technologies, including videoconferencing, mobile apps and virtual and augmented realities, can provide new ways of engaging students in environmental stewardship. Such technologies can pique student interest, while enabling them to capture experiences of local and distal environments, to collect data and share their findings with broader audiences. This article critically explores innovative, formal and informal learning practices in experiential environmental education approaches among schools, families and communities, such as citizen science projects. It draws on qualitative case study vignettes, as well as the authors' previous work and broader literature, to consider the potential and limitations of such technologies and approaches. The key question concerns how existing and emerging technologies might serve as bridges or barriers to apprenticing young people into globally-minded, environmentally responsible and respectful behaviours.
Adult Education as a Methodological Arm of Environmental Adult Education (EAE)
Adult education is a "process whose major social roles are characteristics of adult status undertake systematic and sustained learning activities for the purpose of bringing about changes in knowledge, attitudes, and values or skills" (Darkenwald and Merriam as cited by Merriam and Brockett, 1997). This definition bears two main features of adult education -- its target audience who are the matured or members of the society who belong to the productive age, and its main goal of equipping these individuals with capacities to bring about the necessary change (Egunyomi, 2009). With these two significant features, various disciples are borrowing the concept of adult education in promoting awareness and changing behaviors and practices about a certain concept under their own fields. One of which is the environmental education, hence the birth of environmental adult education. Environmental adult education (EAE) is a unique field of practice but it is better explained through the combination of different theories from different fields including adult education. Basically, it is defined as a hybrid of environmental education and adult learning theories to provide meaningful experiences to the learners and to bring about genuine environmental change. (Haugen, 2010) EAE is composed on complex and interrelated systems that encompass not on the ecological concerns but political and cultural context (UNESCO Institute of Education, 1997) including race, welfare, employment and gender, among the others (Clover, 1999). With the complexity and interconnected issues linked to the field, it is interesting to know how EAE continuously operates within its mission of educating the public about environmental issues and governance. Moreover, it is more interesting to explore the roles of adult education, as the methodological arm of EAE, in performing the ultimate goal of this field which is to bring about genuine environmental change. And this is the major theme of this paper. It tries to define the niche of adult education in environmental education. Specifically, it identifies sample cases around the globe that would further elaborate the significant contributions of adult education to EAE.