Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education Research
Mrazek, Rick (ed.) (1993).
Troy, Ohio: NAAEE; 333 pages. $20.00 (non-members); $16.00 (members). ISBN 1884008046.
At its annual conference in 1990, the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) held a symposium on 'Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education Research,' which became the nucleus for this monograph. The symposium took up questions about the nature and history of different research paradigms: the assumptions that each makes about theory and practice, including definitions of rigor, validity, and generalizability and views about the nature of teachers, learners, subject matter, and the learning environment. The resulting collection is for the stout of heart who are undaunted by more than 300 pages of platform presentations, position statements, responses, and case studies of research projects in more or less finished form. For readers who are interested in understanding the status of North American environmental education research at this time, it is an illuminating volume.
According to the editor, Rick Mrazek, the purpose of the collection is to invite participation in debate over philosophy, theory, and practice, with the goal of ultimately finding 'signposts which help provide direction' (p.3): direction, the reader is left to assume, to making sense of the debate itself and to selecting personally congenial research approaches. Considering that the monograph ends with a copy of the guidelines for publication in the Journal of Environmental Education - the main North American outlet for research in this field - the intended audience appears to be current and prospective researchers, including graduate students in research courses. Therefore, fortitude for the monograph's succession of positions and counter-positions is taken for granted.
John Disinger, a seasoned leader in the North American environmental education community, opens the collection with a brief paper which challenges the title. The choice of the term 'alternative paradigms,' he notes, invites comparison with Thomas Kuhn's influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather than a simple dictionary definition of a paradigm as a 'pattern, example, model,' Kuhn's paradigms refer to fundamentally different conceptual frameworks that involve fundamentally different world views, research practices, and interpretations of evidence, as in the shift from Ptolemy's geocentric to Copernicus's heliocentric cosmology. The monograph's debate, Disinger observes, is not on this level. He recommends that 'Alternative Models in Environmental Education Research' would have been a more moderate and accurate title. Given that in research, a 'model' refers to the identification of key variables and their relationships - whereas contributors to this volume discuss general philosophies, assumptions, methods, and purposes - this reader's own recommendation is that an even less pretentious 'alternative perspectives' or 'alternative approaches' would be more accurate.
Disinger also makes several opening observations which are essential to a critical reading of the monograph, but which subsequent contributions tend to ignore. He notes that the scope of environmental education, in terms of content areas, purposes, and audiences, is extremely broad; ranging from nature study to sustainable development, involving cognitive information, feeling, and behavior change, among cradle-to-grave populations, and in formal and non-formal settings. The environmental educators who are represented in the monograph, however, focus almost exclusively on formal school-based education. Disinger asks that environmental education research acknowledge differences in audiences, with a corresponding necessity for different approaches. As an example of the need for a broad vision of environmental education, he mentions extensive media-related research dealing with the mass communication of environmental information, which has not been assimilated into the environmental education research discussion.
At the same time, Disinger notes that there is an inherent conflict between the goals of environmental education and formal education. According to William Stapp's often-quoted definition:
Environmental education is aimed at producing a citizenry that is knowledgeable concerning the biophysical environment and its associated problems, aware of how to help solve those problems, and motivated to work toward their solution (p.23).
Stapp's definition goes beyond knowledge and awareness to motivation to work towards the solution of environmental problems: a potentially profound commitment. Most areas of education, in contrast, focus on cognition or, at most, the identification of values. This conflict should call into question the monograph's (and NAAEE's) emphasis on formal school-based education. The monograph as a whole, however, ignores the conflict. In fact, papers repeatedly refer to 'K-12'or 'classes' as the assumed research setting.
This implicit narrowing of the settings and scope of environmental education is ironic, given the results of a number of studies within the field itself. A body of research on the antecedents of 'responsible environmental behavior' suggests that it is related to many unprogrammed hours spent in childhood in wild or semi-wild places, role models who are often not teachers, influential books and other mass media, and opportunities to practice activism - often out in the community rather than in the classroom. For long-term readers of Children's Environments, who are accustomed to thinking of environmental learning in all the contexts of children's lives, including city streets, suburban and small town neighborhoods, the home, community programs, and participatory design and planning, this classroom focus appears particularly 'out of place.'
Within these limits, Alternative Paradigms in Environmental Education Research reviews a variety of research approaches and methods. In keeping with its goal of inviting the broadest possible participation, it presents different approaches critically but non-judgmentally, leaving final evaluation and choices up to the reader.
Tom Marcinkowski, a professor in the Science Education Department at the Florida Institute of Technology, opens the presentations with an appropriately broad overview. Entitled 'A Contextual Review of the 'Quantitative Paradigm' in Environmental Education Research,' almost half of his paper consists of context setting, as he examines how research phenomena are filtered through numerous conceptual, methodological, and analytical decisions (explicit and implicit) and compares the decisions that are usually associated with quantitative and qualitative research. Within this context, Marcinkowski reviews advantages and limitations of quantitative methods, noting, along the way, that quantitative methods are frequently, but mistakenly, equated with a positivist position. Because he does not make this identification, he closes his paper with an appeal for cooperation and deliberate triangulation across quantitative and qualitative programs of research. (A minor weakness of this paper is a distracting number of typographical errors.)
Like the majority of papers within the collection, most of Marcinkowski's review applies to research in general rather than environmental education research in particular. In a section that is specific to environmental education, he perceptively analyzes research-related problems that extend beyond 'paradigm' conflicts. The methodological quality of much reported environmental education research, from designs through to data collection procedures, has been substandard and individual studies are the rule rather than cohesive programs of research. As Marcinkowski notes, these problems can be partly explained by the historical lack of finding in this field. Now that environmental problems have moved to the main stage of public policy concerns, the funding situation is beginning to change. In this regard, the problems that Marcinkowski identifies - as well as problems that the monograph as a whole suggests - require a plan of action so that money and effort can be spent as effectively as possible. Subsequent papers present a cafeteria selection of alternative research approaches: interpretivism by Diane Cantrell, action research and critical inquiry by Paul Hart, phenomenology by Arjen Wals, and narrative inquiry by Noel Gough. As a phenomenologist myself, I was particularly appreciative of Wal's eloquent introduction to phenomenology and its relevance to environmental education questions. He disregards, however, Marcinkowski's appeal for cooperation across research programs and his caution that quantitative analyses should not be equated with positivism. As a consequence, Wals presents phenomenology as an either-or choice: either phenomenology or positivism. Therefore, he rejects environmental education goals 'in terms of desired behavioral outcomes' and designs that show concern for control, predictability, and generalizability. Other papers echo this dichotomy between one chosen approach and 'alternatives.'
The most extreme example of combativeness rather than cooperation is the paper 'Beyond Behaviorism' by Ian Robottom. Robottom, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University, Australia, notes that the original 1990 symposium on which the monograph is based was titled 'Contesting Paradigms in Environmental Education Research' and he argues that 'contesting paradigms,' not 'alternative paradigms,' should have been maintained in the monograph title. He claims that research choices reflect 'essentially contested concepts' and he proceeds to identify quantitative research with positivism and behaviorism. Its goal, he argues, is to control, through behavior modification, ways of thinking and acting valued by the researchers. In contrast, research should explicate 'the aspirations, assumptions, presuppositions and values held tacitly or consciously by practitioners' (p.139). Rather than showing concern for generalizability, research should judge its success by the enlightenment and self-understanding that it brings practitioners. The monograph closes with a brief rejoinder by Marcinkowski, which points out the fallacy of identifying research methods with single paradigms such as positivism and behaviorism.
In response to authors' repeated - and I think warranted - admonitions that we need to acknowledge our personal biases, I will admit to mine as a reviewer. I endorse and use phenomenology and critical hermeneutics and, therefore, I am entirely receptive to the monograph's goal of placing research in its social, historical, philosophical, and personal contexts. I also accept, however, the axiom of Joachim Wohlwill, one of the first developmental psychologists to interest himself in children's environmental experience, to the effect that 'the environment is not in our heads.' I have already expressed my concern with the narrow scope of environmental education that the collection as a whole reflects. Wohlwill's axiom leads me to a related, but even more fundamental, concern with the monograph's implied assumptions.
In a brief, but for me illuminating piece, Soren Breiting of Denmark contrasts 'former visions' of environmental education with 'the new generation'. Former visions, he observes, accepted the intrinsic value of nature and stressed natural science, nature experience, conservation of wildlife and natural areas, and a search for a life in harmony with nature. The new generation of environmental education, on the contrary, stresses human values, human ecology, community experience, and harmony with descendants. Breiting presents this shift as 'a qualitative step towards a new paradigm much more in accordance with the aim of environmental education' (p. 199). For someone like myself who sees the two visions as necessarily complementary, rather than oppositional and who believes that 'the environment is not in our heads,' the proposed shift is problematic. Yet the monograph as a whole implicitly endorses this shift.
By inviting participants in the research discussion to present their positions without any editorial framework of evaluation and judgment, the monograph invites readers to take their pick according to personal predisposition. Research choices then become matters of opinion and taste. It follows that several contributors identify concerns for validity, reliability, and generalizability as outmoded positivist biases. Concerns for validity and reliability presuppose that there are verifiable truths regarding human behavior and belief and the resulting quality of the environment outside our heads and that research is accountable to truth. Otherwise, as Plato persuasively demonstrated at the outset of The Republic in the fourth century BC, if we do not believe in verifiable truths, the 'truth' about issues becomes whatever is conveniently determined by the power of the stronger. This is exactly the appeal to power that Cantrell, Hart, Robottom, Wals, and Gough oppose, but it is the logical conclusion of an emphasis on what is in our heads to the exclusion of verifiable interpretations and outcomes. Concern for validity and reliability is an essential aspect of science, whether research be quantitative or qualitative.
The monograph presentation of different research approaches as mutually exclusive alternatives also distorts historical foundations. Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a necessary critical grounding for quantitative, behavioral research, not as something opposed to it. Similarly, Kurt Lewin conceived of action research as an extension of laboratory designs to field settings and he was famous for his combination of field-based research with conventional rigor. Leading readers to believe that they must choose between experimental measures of validity and reliability or critical and phenomenological research encourages the substandard designs that Marcinkowski identifies as one of the weaknesses of the research field.
Rather than continuing to air courteously the widest possible variety of research positions and approaches, a more productive project for environmental education leaders and for future publications would acknowledge the different purposes that different approaches and methods serve (a task to which the present monograph contributes). After this beginning, it would show how different approaches can complement each other within integrated, cooperative research efforts. To this end, an issue-oriented rather than methods-oriented structure would be effective. For example, a future monograph might show how both quantitative and qualitative research can contribute to an understanding of effective education and communication to encourage people of all ages to welcome and show stewardship for land preservation and 'green corridors' within their communities. In miniature, the present monograph includes an example of such a coordinated approach in a case study of 'Goals and Conflicts in University-Based Environmental Education Centers' by Jackie Palmer, which combines quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods. As Disinger observes, environmental problems implicate all ages, in non-formal as well as formal settings. As environmental education research itself shows, significant learning takes place as children engage with the media, with family and societal role models, with community and wilderness programs, and with the streets, woods, and yards around their homes, as well as with classroom curricula. Understanding this broad base of learning will require a broad base of methods.
An issue-oriented approach to future debate will require a concern for what is not in our heads, as well as what is. As an example of positivist, behaviorist, quantitative presuppositions, Robottom specifically criticizes an article by Hines, Hungerford, and Tomera which observes that some people show no desire to alleviate environmental problems and that in these cases 'these individuals may be enticed into behaving responsibly toward the environment by the application of behavioral intervention strategies' and in the case of certain environmental problems, it may be more efficacious 'to manipulate situational factors in order to produce the desired behavior changes' (p. 135). Robottom's own preference for enlightenment through critical self-reflection is appealing, but anyone who has worked on environmental issues has seen that not everyone is interested in being enlightened. A faith in the value of self-reflection presumes human free will; but the doctrine of free will allows that some people will choose to be greedy and destructive. Meanwhile, human attitudes and behaviors have very real effects on ecosystems, so that the preservation of nature's harmony and diversity will require coordinated processes of both critical self-reflection and the manipulation of situational factors in order to produce desired behavior changes. Correspondingly, it will require research into both approaches.
As a final recommendation for future publications, environmental education leaders would do well to pay attention to a short paper in this monograph on 'Designing for Impact' by Martha Monroe and Stephen Kaplan. Monroe and Kaplan note that 'the success of the transfer of research results to a learner is dependent on how the information is communicated and the extent to which it is memorable' (p.147). Therefore, important environmental education research questions for the future include How does the researcher come to understand what practitioners need? What contributes to memorability in a research paper? What approach or combination of approaches achieves the most credibility with the intended audience? The authors recommend the use of concrete illustrations, examples, cases, and data that provide 'interesting, memorable landmarks' to communicate environmental education theory and models and an exploration of 'a story-like structure for explaining the cases and examples' (p.148).
Unlike committed researchers and captive graduate students, teachers, parents, community leaders, and environmentalists who work with children cannot be expected to push their way through the dense prose and loosely coordinated structure that characterizes this monograph - yet they are the audience that researchers ultimately want to reach. Issue-focused publications which illustrate possibilities for cooperative research projects lend themselves to the format that Monroe and Kaplan recommend and are probably more likely to be assimilated and used by a broad audience. For this reason, as well as to promote more effective research, environmental education researchers and associations should explore alternative forms of discussion and communication, as well as alternative approaches.
Reviewer Information
Whitney Young College of Kentucky State University
Louise Chawla holds degrees in developmental psychology and environmental psychology, and is the international coordinator of UNESCO’s Growing Up in Cities project. She is a professor at Whitney Young College, an interdisciplinary honors program at Kentucky State University. Dr. Chawla also serves as an adjunct professor in the doctoral program in Environmental Studies at Antioch New England Graduate School in New Hampshire.