Popular and informal environmental education: the need for more research in an "emerging" field of practice

Abstract

Environmental education that fosters meaningful community participation and learning has been considered a requisite to sustaining our human and natural environments in many of the global conferences, agreements, declarations and charters since the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. Despite this growing consensus there is a small amount of published research in Australia in this field of practice we have decided to call popular and informal environmental education - education that often involves adults in social action. The authors argue, however, that there is no shortage of educational practice that can be described as popular and informal environmental education. The autors propose a typology that will assist in defining this field of practice and establish theoretical links with the emerging field of environmental adult education.