Outdoor and Environmental Education Centres provide programs that are designed to address a range of environmental education aims, and contribute broadly to student learning for sustainability. This paper examines the roles such Centres can play, and how they might contribute to the Australian Government's initiative in relation to sustainable schools. Interviews with the principals of 23 such Centres in Queensland revealed three roles or models under which they operate: the destination model; the expert/advisor model; and the partnership model. Principals' understandings of these roles are discussed and the factors that support or hinder their implementation are identified. It is concluded that while the provision of programs in the environment is still a vital role of outdoor and environmental education centres, these can also be seen as a point of entry to long-term partnerships with whole school communities.

Despite the increasing importance of, and interest in, documenting the impact of environmental education programs on students' learning for sustainability, few tools are currently available to measure young students' environmental learning across all the dimensions of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours. This paper reports on the development of such a tool, using an iterative action research process with 134 students, aged six to eleven, attending programs at an Environmental Education Centre in Queensland, Australia. The resulting instrument, the Environmental Learning Outcomes Survey (ELOS) incorporates observations of students' engagement in learning processes as well as measuring learning outcomes, and allows both of these aspects to be linked to particular components of the environmental education program. Test data using the instrument are reported to illustrate its potential usefulness. It is envisaged that the refined instrument (appended) will enable researchers to measure student environmental learning in the field, investigate environmental education program impacts and identify aspects of programs that are most effective in facilitating student learning.

Narrative is fundamental to our diverse capacities to remember, to provide an account of self, and to represent our actions, motivations and place in society. The narrative mode is concerned with central aspects of the human condition – commitments and personal agency; motivations and emotions; collective experiences and cultural histories and myths. As such it is concerned with relationships between people, their activities within particular places and the ethics that arise in these specific relationships. This paper explores the role of narrative as a pedagogical device and as a form of thinking and valuing for students to use in their everyday interactions. In particular, it considers why a combination of environmental narrative, drama and deep attentive reflection sits so well with the emerging pedagogies of “place”, and why this alliance is such an effective means for allowing individuals to experience, understand and value for themselves the entwined and sensorial connections that exist between people and place. Based on a year-long values education case study in eight primary schools, we describe and theorise about why such a narrative approach to pedagogy, when linked to deep attentive experiences in nature, is so effective in developing a new kind of place-based body/mind meaning-making and learning that inspires individuals to engage with both the inner and outer work of sustainability.