Place-based Approaches to Environmental Education

Environmental attitudes and knowledge have been shown to have very different effects on behavior change depending, among others, on geographic contextual factors (Braun, Cottrell & Dierkes, 2017). Place-based education (PBE) approaches not only promote greater awareness of local environments, culture and history, but they can engender the individual attachment to nature. It was shown by Orr (1994) and Kudryavtsev, et al (2012) that place attachment can help promoting pro-sustainable behavior.

However, the complex relationship between local, place-based approaches to environmental education and individual environmental behavior requires further attention. How to change individuals’ behavior and bring across positive learning outcomes remains unclear and is still a major challenge for governments, organizations and institutions worldwide (Gifford, 2011; Weber & Johnson, 2012; Whitmarsh, Lorenzoni & O’Neill, 2012).

Therefore, it is timely to evaluate how the field of environmental education could benefit from refining existent or develop new teaching approaches that more explicitly incorporate place-based scholarship to connect abstract and distant environmental problems (e.g. sea level rise or global temperature increase) to students’ everyday life.

The thematic cluster calls for papers that investigate place-informed aspects of formal and non-formal environmental education programs and how these can shape and are shaped by student learning. We invite presentation that are related, but not limited, to the following broad themes:

• PBE Curriculum Inclusion

• PBE and Pedagogy

• PBE and Community Involvement

• PBE Based Learning Outcomes

Contact: baars.rogercloud.6a@kyoto-u.ac.jp