Environmental Education
This week's reading focuses on Environmental Education. It identifies academic institutions and the media as main actors in environmental struggles and it looks at the conflicts among them to reach their goals. As shown by Gillian Symons in "Education For Sustainability", Environmental Education (EE) enables one to develop the skills needed to analyze and solve environmental problems. It teaches us How and not What to think about the environment. It also enhances our decision-making skills as well as develops our critical thinking by increasing our understanding of the environmental challenges we are faced with today. The media, on the other hand, want to teach us what to think and not how to think. They do so by choosing a certain framework and presenting it to us by visual means. In his work, "Participatory Democracy in Enemy Territory", DeLuca shows how the media filter situations so that they affect profit orientation framing and conventions. He shows this in a long analysis of a CBS clip on the Greenpeace confrontation with whalers and he shows how it is presented in a heroic Cold War frame. The media are often also intertwined with corporations who incorporate them into their strategy to promot
The second is the "utilitarian conservation" viewpoint that stresses the need for the preservation of the environment for its future use. In order for EE to be effective, children and students have to understand the need for active citizenship. It was especially appealing to children because of its apparent universality and optimistic perspective on finding solutions to environmental concerns. It was the first program that blended environment and education at the same time. Because of the increasing corporate influence, there is a growing dependency of schools on businesses. If one looks at the different issues they cover, there is a clear domination of two themes. This can only happen once this basic knowledge is established and it has to be followed by critical inquiry in order to explore alternative solutions. Furthermore, despite the over-simplistic representation of environmental concerns and of the ways to deal with them, EE still reaches to a young audience and is a first step towards understanding what is at stake. Environmental organizations have often had to reach out to Media moguls such as Ted Turner in order to highlight the issue they are advocating. It gave the impression that one lived in a fairyland, a conflict-free world. Captain Planet may be seen as a form of commercialized education that is only aimed at developing consumer skills rather than citizenship; however the 30 second tags at the end of each episode still give children an insight on different ways of preserving the environment like changing kitchen habits, recycling, using paper bags and rechargeable batteries etc. They become aware, because of their close relationship with their kin, of their personal responsibility towards Nature, while keeping a positive outlook devoid of hopelessness and open to finding solutions. It omitted the differences in interests of all groups involved, narrowing the issue to a one-on-one struggle between the "goodies" and the "baddies" who usually remained faceless and nameless. Despite this inevitable corporate manipulation, I think that EE is necessary for the development of critical inquiry, universal knowledge and problem-solving. This is clearly illustrated in Glynis Daniels' reading on the content of school books.
Common topics in this essay:
Glynis Daniels',
Captain Planet,
Learning Tree,
Cold War,
Education EE,
Selling Environmentalism,
Environmental Education,
Territory DeLuca,
Ted Turner,
Corporate Assault,
captain planet,
environmental education,
environmental concerns,
corporations ee,
finding solutions,
critical inquiry,
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Acceptance Essays
