Annette Gough

RMIT University | RMIT · School of Education

Climate change is accelerating, and it is becoming clearer that the education sector in countries around the world will bear the brunt of the effects. Research into the impacts of climate change on schools and children as well as their engagement in responses is still sparse, albeit growing. In this paper, Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and...

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen a...

The editorial of the special issue of Gender and Education introduces the focus which is on the relationship of ecofeminisms and the environment to gender and education in the broadest sense. It provides an opportunity to re-think how ecofeminisms have, or could, inform educational theory and practice.

Climate change is intensifying the risks faced by children's lives, as well as impacting their learning and education. How school communities in Bhutan are dealing with issues related to climate change is largely uncharted. This study examined how Bhutanese schools have been affected by the changing climate and how they were responding to it. The d...

The term “cyborg,” as a combination of “cybernetics” and “organism,” was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in a paper presented at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conference on space exploration as a representation of a particular challenge of space travel: physically adapting a human body to survive in a host...

In this essay, we argue that postqualitative inquiry is not a useful descriptor for environmental education research and that it is time to consider what comes after the posts. We argue that thinking with theory as a process methodology in the onto-epistemological framings of our research is more generative and opens up opportunities for this resea...

This article brings together a feminist environmentalist cartoonist with a feminist environmental educator in an exploration of the generativity of cartoons in environmental education research and teaching. Using duoethnography as a methodology, and drawing on critical and new materialist feminist theory, we explore our personal memories, stories,...

In her widely cited and influential “cyborg manifesto”, Donna Haraway argues that “cyborg imagery” can provide a way out of the maze of dualisms we have used to explain our bodies and our tools to ourselves and concludes by asserting that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. We depart from the cyborg/goddess distinction by invoking a widely...

In her widely cited and influential "cyborg manifesto", Donna Haraway (1991, 181) argues that "cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" and concludes by asserting that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess". We depart from the cyborg/goddess distinction by...

Humans have ambiguous relationships with fire. The ability to control fire has been part of shaping human development and human society as well as the characteristics of Australian ecosystems, but bushfire is also a threat to all forms of life. The chemical process of combustion is also complicit in the Anthropocene and climate change, which threat...

This essay responds to Jill Williams and Sara Tolbert (2021) and discusses the similarities and differences in curriculum, classroom, teaching and standards between Arizona, USA, and Victoria, Australia. Williams and Tolbert relate a good news story in a state of neoliberal educational despair. This essay argues that, from a relatively well support...

The term “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to denote the present time interval as a new epoch of geological time dominated by human impact on the Earth. The starting date for the epoch is contentious—around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1800 ce ), at the start of the nuclear age, or some other t...

Following Constance Russell, Tema Sarick, and Jacqueline Kennelly’s (Can J Environ Educ 7(1):54–66, 2002) pioneering foray into the generative possibilities of mobilizing queer theorizing in environmental education, we were encouraged to follow them a short time later with our own collaborative explorations of this academic territory (Gough et al.,...

In the past, women, queer, Indigenous and disabled people, as well as race, class and body size issues, have been overlooked in most environmental education programs through being subsumed into the notion of “universalised people,” the “norm.” However, people in each of these marginalised groups has a distinctive contribution to make to environment...

Similar to much of the world, the Australian Government has a vision for society to be engaged in and enriched by science which has, as its prime focus, building skills and capabilities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Simultaneously, the Government’s policies and projects, including in education, ignore intergovernmental...

The Hong Kong Green School Award (HKGSA) is a school award scheme hosted by the Environmental Campaign Committee (ECC) to encourage schools to promote environmental awareness and for students to develop an environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Since its inception in 2000, the HKGSA has undergone several phases of development. Between 2000 to 2008 it...

This chapter discusses the impact of the various green school programs on education for sustainable development in the countries included in this volume and how this impact needs to be problematised in terms of measurable and unmeasurable outcomes. It also discusses the challenges and opportunities experienced by the various green school programs a...

This chapter introduces the edited collection of stories of green school movements around the world and the impacts they have had on the development of environmental education and education for sustainable development in their respective countries.

This chapter traces the association between green and education, noting the similarities in concerns with the four pillars of green political parties and the principles developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). It discusses the emergence of notions of greening education in the late 1980s, and green schools’ movements...

Learning about climate change from an early age will be crucial for future generations to tackle the problems it presents, but education policies are falling silent on the issue

This paper discusses the apparent amnesia with regard to insights manifested in ecofeminist thought and applies a re-collective analysis to thinking on the implications of an ecofeminist new materialism for contemporary environmental education research, and curriculum practice. We engage with a conversation between feminist new materialism and the...

This article argues that it is essential for all children and young people, regardless of their geographic location in Australia, to have appropriate education about bushfire prevention, mitigation, preparedness and response.

Green Schools Globally brings together stories of the green school movements (Eco Schools, Enviroschools, Green Schools, Sustainable Schools, ResourceSmart Schools etc) in several countries around the world, with a focus on the impact of the movement on the development and implementation of education for sustainable development in each of the count...

The environmental education movement developed in the 1970s at the same time as the environment movement, the feminist movement and the ecofeminist movement. However, while environmental education feels a close affinity with the environment movement the relationship with the (eco)feminist movement in environmental education research has been less t...

This is a book review: Siniawer, Eiko Maruko (2018) Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN9781501725845

This essay explores the implications for inquiries in sustainability education of Helmreich’s discussions of how human biocultural practices scramble nature and culture, life forms and forms of life, and his ethos of acceptance of ambiguous boundaries and transformative linkages with others. The silences in Helmreich’s arguments around gender and s...

This chapter describes networking for education for sustainable development within the Austrian ECOLOG-schools network. It discusses theoretical concepts of Education for Sustainable Development and school development from an Austrian perspective, as well as networks in education in general and the organisation of the ECOLOG-network in particular....

There has been extensive research into adult leadership and, increasingly, into adult leadership for sustainability. However, there has been less research in the areas of child and adolescent leadership and even less in the area of child and adolescent leadership for sustainability. Furthermore, there is no research-based, developmental framework t...

Children today are growing up in a world of ever increasing disaster risks. Climate change, population growth, rapid urbanization and growing social and economic inequality are all exposing greater numbers of people to damage and loss, and children are amongst the most vulnerable. However, children are also ‘agents of change’ who possess unique cap...

This essay explores the implications for inquiries in sustainability education of Helmreich’s (2009) discussions of how human biocultural practices scramble nature and culture, life forms and forms of life, and his ethos of acceptance of ambiguous boundaries and transformative linkages with others. The silences in Helmreich’s arguments around gende...

At a time when the world’s oceans seem to be drowning in plastics waste materials, and cities around the globe struggle to keep up with their citizen’s rubbish, even that deemed recyclable, in part because China is now refusing to import contaminated recyclable materials, this book would seem to be, from its title, a timely analysis of the situatio...

Presentation to Asian Studies faculty and students, University of Western Australia

Secondary students’ resistance to learning science is nothing new but it has been of interest to me since I started my teaching career in the 1970s and academic career in 1990. Although, that such resistance exists is now widely accepted, in 1990 many were in denial – except for some feminist writers, and it was in feminist theory that I found my i...

Adult leadership has been a research focus for some time and, more recently, some researchers have turned their attention to adult leadership as it relates to sustainability. However, there has been far less research in the field of child and adolescent leadership, with only a few researchers addressing adolescent leadership for sustainability. In...

This commentary responds to the seven articles in this issue by reading them through lenses of tinkering and tailoring, juxtaposing and extending them with other writings across a range of fields. Disrupting and displacing methodologies in science education is not something new. There are multiple examples from two and more decades ago where scienc...

In this paper I argue that the current version of the Australian Curriculum: Science being implemented in schools is more about encouraging ignorance and creating a ‘No’ church. A rejection of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ church binary provides an opportunity to de-centre arguments and engage with the silences in the curriculum documents that have been hig...

The second special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education devoted to gender and environmental education comes at an interesting moment in popular culture. The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to support girls and women of color who had experienced sexual violence, became a global phenomenon in 2017 when celebrities...

Nature and Human Nature — Two Perspectives - The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future Arran Gare, Abingdon, Oxon/New York, Routledge, 2017 - Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control From Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution Carolyn Merchant, New York, Routledge, 2016 - Volume 34 Issue 1...

This chapter is essential reading for understanding the origins and evolution of the much debated and misunderstood concept ‘sustainable development’. It argues that achieving sustainable development requires balancing of economic, environmental and social goals, highlights the lack of international consensus and commitment on these issues, and ass...

Fifteen years ago we explored the implications of adopting a poststructuralist feminist research methodology in environmental education research and practice. We argued that speaking the world into existence provides multiple ways of thinking about and comprehending environmental knowledge and the way we experience ourselves in space, time, and pla...

This article traces the shifts in environmental education discourses from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, to the 2012 UN Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, and beyond through a biopolitical lens. Each of the earlier shifts is reflected in environmental, sustainability and science education policies and curricula—but what...

Social Learning Towards a Sustainable World: Principles, Perspectives and Praxis Arjen E. J. Wals (Editor) Wageningen Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 2007 - Annette Gough

Environmental education has long been recognized as critical for achieving environmental awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective participation in environmental decision-making. Since the Declaration of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment concerns about m...

For the past 30 years or so, a small group of environmental education scholars have attended to gender and promoted feminist theories and methodologies (e.g., Barrett,2005; Barron,1995; Davies,2013; DiChiro,1987; Fawcett,2000; Fontes,2002; Gough,1999a,1999b,2004; Gough & Whitehouse,2003;Gray,2016; Hallen,2000; Harvester & Blenkinsop, 2010; Li,2007;...

Despite efforts over the past 40 plus years, environmental sustainability is still on the margins of the curriculum in most countries. While there is much evidence that children enjoy learning about and in the environment, many teachers remain reluctant to teach environmental sustainability, and governments frequently marginalise the area. This cha...

Critical discourse analysis is a powerful linguistic tool that can be applied to environmental policy and curriculum documents (discourse/text) to unveil the underlying social goods and power relationships embedded in text. It provides teachers, curriculum coordinators, principals and others (readers) with the means to investigate the agenda of the...

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education cont...

Since the earliest formulations of the UN goals for environmental education (EE) at the Belgrade conference (1975), through the reconceptualization of education for sustainable development (ESD) at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), to The Future We Want (2012), teacher education—at pre-service and in-service levels...

The concept ‘gender’ encompasses learned roles and responsibilities of men and women created in society and learned expectations about the characteristics, aptitudes and behaviours of men and women. This chapter on gender takes, as its starting point, that the pre-condition and aim of urban sustainability citizenship is to achieve societies that ar...

This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural...

This ‘history’ of environmental education traces the emergence of the field in formal education and educational research. The word ‘a’ is intentionally employed in the chapter title because this is my story of my understanding of where the movement has come from and what has informed it. This chapter is also historical research: a curriculum histor...

This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resou...

This study explores the social forces operating within the school-family sustainability milieu, in the context of a family that lives sustainably, and participates in school sustainability projects. We conducted open-ended interviews with two students who attend a state secondary school, their parents, the sustainability coordinator, and the princi...

Deep ecology is an ecological philosophy that promotes an ecocentric lifestyle to remedy the problems of depleting resources and planetary degradation. An integral part of this ecosophy is the process of forming a metaphysical connection to the earth, referred to as self-realisation; an unfolding of the self out into nature to attain a transcendent...

Faculties and Schools of Education in the newer Australian universities, as in many other countries, generally started as teachers’ colleges that were amalgamated with universities at some time in the past. Traditionally, teachers colleges were not research focused and with the shift to being universities the academic staff have had to focus on a n...

This study investigates ecocentrism in secondary schools and challenges the anthropocentric view of conserving natural resources for future humans. It aims to reveal whether sustainability education in schools is driven by a narrow science focus or whether there are deep ecology perspectives also operating to solve environmental problems. This stud...

Environmental education has been recognised as critical for achieving environmental awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective participation in environmental decision making since at least the Declaration of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and desertif...

This paper explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resourc...

The Australian Journal of Environmental Education, first published in 1984, is a rich source for investigating the history of environmental education in Australia as it has sampled research and writings in the field since the Australian Association for Environmental Education was established in 1980. The Journal captures some of the ghosts that hau...

Documenting a history of environmental education in Australia within an international context has been a research focus (some would say obsession) of mine since 1974, when I undertook a ‘needs for environmental education’ survey for the Curriculum Development Centre. Given the human-centred issues that launched the field (clean air and water, popul...

This article charts the history of environmental education over four decades - from the 1960s to 2006 - as a rocky road of determined chocolate with the possibilities of rocks (nuts) and easy passage {mars h mal low). There were distractions such as suggestions of changing names and new directions (add fruit?) along the way but the road has continu...

2014 represents the 30th year of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education ( AJEE ), making it one of the oldest academic journals in environmental education still in publication. The oldest is The Journal of Environmental Education , founded in 1969. Another journal, The International Journal of Environmental Education and Information , wa...

This essay responds to the contribution of Volny Fages and Virginia Albe, in this volume, to the field of research in science education, and places it in the context of the plethora of government and industry policy documents calling for more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education in schools and universities and the tensi...

The need to change the perspectives from which we think and act is one of the foundations of environmental education. As Michel Foucault (1990) wrote, “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and refl...

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field’s heteronormati...

This essay reviews the contribution of Rowhea Elmesky in this volume, to the field of research in science education, and places it in the context of the juncture of youth disengagement with science, multicultural education and globalisation, with an underlay of a historical context and critiques of science education from feminist and postcolonial p...

This paper reviews Australian Government actions related to environmental education, particularly in the past decade, and examines the actions forthcoming from two national action plans (Environment Australia, 2000 and DEWHA, 2009), the implementation strategy for the Decade of ESD (DEWHA, 2006) and developments related to the Australian Curriculum...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2011000100017 Este artigo questiona o relativo silêncio da teoria e da teorização queer sobre apesquisa em educação ambiental. Exploramos algumas possibilidades para tornar queer apesquisa em educação ambiental ao criar (estimulando outras/os a fazer o mesmo) narrativasde Camp Wilde, um local imaginário que nos...