Editorial

No Abstrac

Addendum to the paper Landcare: New directions in professional development for environmental education

No Abstract

Think Piece: Conceptions of Quality and ‘Learning as Connection’- Teaching for Relevance

This think piece captures some of the thinking that emerged in and through the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Environmental Education Programme research programme. This research programme emerged over a five-year period (2008–2012) and involved ten southern African teacher education institutions from eight countries (see ‘Acknowledgements’). The research programme sought to understand what contributions environment and sustainability education could make to debates on educational quality and relevance. Issues of educational quality are high on the national agendas of governments in southern Africa, as it is now well known that providing access to schooling is not a sufficient condition for achieving educational quality. Educational quality is intimately linked to the processes of teaching and learning, but the concept of educational quality is not unproblematic in and of itself. It is, as Noel Gough (2005) noted many years ago, an ‘order word’ that shapes the way people think and practise. Our enquiries during this research programme involved a number of case studies (that were reported on in the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (SAJEE) in 2008, and are again reported on in this edition of the SAJEE), but the programme also involved theoretical engagement with the concept of educational quality and relevance. This think piece helps to make some of this thinking and theoretical deliberation visible. The author of this think piece was also the leader of the regional research programme and was tasked with synthesising the theoretical deliberations that emerged from the research design which were found to be useful for guiding interpretations and deliberation on more detailed case studies undertaken at country level

Editorial

No Abstract

Editorial: Methodology, Context and Quality

Note: This edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (SAJEE) is a ‘double volume’ and contains papers submitted in 2012 and 2013. The production of a double volume has been necessitated by administrative problems experienced by the journal production team in 2012, which affected the successful publication of a 2012 edition. However, the Council of the Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa (EEASA) agreed to respond by producing a double-volume edition for 2012/2013. Journal readers are reminded that the production of this journal is voluntary and depends heavily on voluntary administration and other systems. The patience of authors and readers in the 2012/2013 years of production is much appreciated. The 2012/2013 double-volume SAJEE is richly textured with two think pieces that open the journal, thirteen research papers and three viewpoint papers. The papers in the 2012/2013 double volume include papers by authors from Sweden, the United Kingdom, India, SouthAfrica, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Kenya, showing that the journal is attracting not only southern African authorship, but also authorship from across the continent and internationally. The present edition of the journal is also interesting in that three different perspectives stand out, namely methodology, context and quality, perspectives which permeate the journal papers in various ways

Editorial

Perspectives on transformations in learning and educatio

Editorial

No Abstract

Editorial

No Abstrac

Think Piece: Pioneers as Relational Subjects? Probing Relationality as Phenomenon Shaping Collective Learning and Change Agency Formation

This paper deliberates on how relationality is framed in collective learning and change agency formation processes, with an emphasis on green economy and renewable energy learning contexts. The paper is not focused on empirical analysis of relationality in collective learning, but rather probes the phenomenon in order to provide more carefully constituted theoretical and analytical tools for further empirical research. The paper uses references to South African and Danish cases (albeit in slightly different ways), and, through this, it sets out to provide tools for generative insights and research into a recent international policy and strategy process which is bringing national-level Green Economy Learning Assessments (GELA) into being, including one in South Africa. Central to these GELAs is the notion of participatory or relational competence, which appears to be a central feature of collective learning, although this is not empirically analysed in this paper. In case study work undertaken for the GELA in South Africa that focused on South Africa’s major renewable energy development, and in the Samsø Island renewable energy transition case in Denmark, this competence appeared to come into focus in praxis. Interestingly, however, it appeared to come into focus colloquially as a discourse on ‘pioneers’ or ‘champions’, a phenomenon noticed in both the South African and Danish contexts. This paper probes this phenomenon further, especially since it initially appears to be contradictory to the emphasis on participatory and relational competence in the GELA study framework. This is because the concept of ‘pioneer/champion’ appears to highlight individual capabilities rather than collective, relational competences. Yet, on closer inspection, it is indeed the relational competences of the pioneer/champion, who is constituted as a ‘relational subject’ with a key role to play in producing shared relational goods, that appears to be significant to the collective learning and action process. This, as argued in the paper, requires a differentiation of relationism and relational realism. This Think Piece, which thinks with both theory and praxis, therefore offers a possible framework for more detailed empirical studies on relationality in collective learning and change agency formation

Rhizome connections...

There are a number of papers in the journal that reflect a trend in environmental education towards deliberating recuperative, relational epistemologies. In their paper addressing the near-schism between those that appear to be antagonistic to post-structuralism and deconstruction, and those that find them generative in their inquiries, Noel Gough and Leigh Price go right to the heart of human inquiry by questioning the most commonly held assumption in the research enterprise – that the social sciences require a different methodology from the natural sciences.Through giving attention to relativist (constructionist) epistemology and a stratified, realist ontology – which assumes a relational account of ontology – they suggest the same basic methodology for both the social and natural sciences, arguing that ‘... society and humans mutually transform/reproduce each other, just as nature and humans mutually transform/reproduce each other’. In doing this, they address over-simplified dialectics between ‘constructionism’ and realism which has shaped much human inquiry (including environmental education research)