Eliciting Students' Understandings: Necessary Steps in Environmental Education

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Abstract
One difficulty in conceptualising the scope of environmental education results from the tremendous breadth of environmental issues which need to be addressed. Environmental issues may be considered, for example, in terms of ‘an interlinked array of political, social, economic and biophysical environmental factors’ (O'Donoghue & McNaught 1991, p.391; see also Di Chiro 1987, p.25). This conception portrays environment as not just natural systems alone, but as ‘a human creation, a result of the way we use nature and its resources to satisfy our needs and wants’ (Fien 1993, p.3). These conceptual developments are consistent with the growing realisation that environmental issues cannot be understood, let alone addressed, in isolation from social and political values and lifestyle choices (Capra, 1982; Devall, 1988; Guha, 1989). Illustrating this thinking, Livingston (in Evernden 1993, p.xii) portrays environmental issues as analogous to the tips of icebergs: they are simply the visible portion of a much larger entity, where the ‘submerged mass constitutes the fundamental problem, that domain of unspoken assumptions which legitimates the behaviour which precipitates the state of affairs we designate as “the environmental crisis”’. Evernden (1993, p.xii) proposes that a consideration of environmental issues must begin with the recognition that their source ‘lies not without but within, not in industrial effluent but in assumptions so casually held as to be virtually invisible’. These interpretations of root causes of environmental issues have important implications for environmental education research and teaching practices.