Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:30:20.931Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Narrative and Nature: Unsustainable Fictions in Environmental Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Noel Gough
Noel Gough*
Affiliation:
Division of Curriculum & Teaching, Victoria College- Rusden, Victoria
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

We live… lives based on selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based on a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. (Durrell 1963)

Environmental education owes its very existence to a particular interpretation of reality. My purpose here is to examine critically the “selected fictions” on which that view of reality is based — to examine the ways in which our perceptions of environmental problems and issues are “conditioned by our position in space and time”. I will argue that some of these perceptions constitute unsustainable fictions and will consider some ways in which we might work towards living lives based on more sustainable constructions of human interrelationships with their environments. I will begin with an illustration of how an interpretation of reality can be changed by taking (to coin Durrell's metaphor) two paces east or west — by glimpsing something familiar from an unusual vantage point.

Type
Research Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 7 , January 1991 , pp. 31 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

References

Brown, H.I.Perception, Theory and Commitment: the New Philosophy of Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979.Google Scholar
Cherryholmes, C.Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education, Teachers College Press, New York, 1988.Google Scholar
Connelly, F.M. and Clandinin, D.J. “Stories of experience and narrative inquiry”, Educational Researcher, 19(5), 1990, pp. 2–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culler, J. “Fostering post-structuralist thinking”. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, USA, 16-20 04 1990.Google Scholar
Curry Jansen, S. “Is science a man? New feminist epistemologies and reconstructions of knowledge”, Theory and Society, 19, 1990, pp. 235–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durrell, L.Balthazar, Faber and Faber, London, 1963.Google Scholar
Fiske, J., Hodge, B. and Turner, G.Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1987.Google Scholar
Fry, T. and Willis, A. “Criticism against the current”, Meanjin, 48(2), 1989, pp. 223–40.Google Scholar
Gough, N. “Renewing our mythic links with nature: some arts of becoming ecopolitical in curriculum work”, Curriculum Perspectives, 10(2), 1990a, pp. 66–9.Google Scholar
Gough, N. “Healing the earth within us: environmental education as cultural criticism”, Journal of Experiential Education, 13(3), 1990b, pp. 12–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoessle, K. and Van Matre, S.Earth Magic, Acclimatization Experiences Institute, Warrenville, Illinois, 1980.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J-F.The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984.Google Scholar
Merchant, C.The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Harper and Row, New York, 1980.Google Scholar
Novak, B.Nature and Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980.Google Scholar
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board, Environmental Studies Course Development Support Material, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board, Melbourne, 1990.Google Scholar
Watson, H.et alSinging the Land, Signing the Land, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1989.Google Scholar
Whorf, B.L.Language, Thought, and Reality, Wiley, New York, 1956.Google Scholar
World Commission on Environment and Development Our Common Future [“The Brundtland Report”], Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.Google Scholar