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Environmental Education andPrimary Children's Attitudes towardsNature and the EnvironmentMichael Bonnett a & Jacquetta Williams aa Homerton College, CambridgePublished online: 06 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Michael Bonnett & Jacquetta Williams (1998) Environmental Educationand Primary Children's Attitudes towards Nature and the Environment, Cambridge Journal ofEducation, 28:2, 159-174, DOI: 10.1080/0305764980280202
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305764980280202
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Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1998 159
Environmental Education andPrimary Children's Attitudestowards Nature and theEnvironmentMICHAEL BONNETT & JACQUETTA WILLIAMSHomerton College, Cambridge
ABSTRACT Some shortcomings of the current UK National Curriculum policy of deliveringenvironmental education through traditional subjects are outlined and provide the context forreporting the results of a pilot study into Year 5/6 school children's attitudes towards nature andthe environment. Its findings indicate that while the attitudes of children of this age towardsnature and the environment are generally very positive, they can involve a number oflimitations, dichotomies and ambivalences which it will be important for their education to helpthem to address. Issues for educational policy and pedagogy, particularly the need for anenhanced role for pupil discussion and participation in environmental action, are raised.
BACKGROUND: SOME CONCERNSA significant feature of the revised UK National Curriculum (School Cur-riculum and Assessment Authority, 1994) was the loss of the five cross-curricular themes, one of which was environmental education. This left onlysome aspects of science and geography which dealt directly with the environ-ment in the formal curriculum in Key Stages 1/2 (School Curriculum andAssessment Authority, 1996). Nonetheless, many experiences children have inprimary school which are not ostensibly part of environmental education haveconsiderable impact on their attitudes towards the environment. The totalinfluence of the school's programme, explicit and implicit, takes on a particularsignificance in the light of the following research findings.
Firstly, while there is evidence to suggest that the mass media are a majorsource of knowledge and influence on children's views (see for example Blum,1987), there is also a growing body of evidence to confirm that the media canbe highly selective in their presentation of environmental issues. Monitoring thecoverage of environmental issues given by different newspapers over a period offour years, Lacey & Longman (1993, 1994) found that the tabloid press devoteda much smaller proportion of articles to environmental issues than the broad-
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sheets and that both tabloids and broadsheets on the 'right' of the politicalspectrum consistently displayed a more negative (and sometimes downrighthostile) attitude towards green perspectives compared with those on the 'left'.With the press in private hands, the 'gatekeeper' role of newspaper editors inrelation to the news is largely unregulated. Furthermore, they found that just ascertain environmental effects were increasing in importance, they could simul-taneously receive less news coverage, having lost novelty value. Along with therange of arbitrary portrayals of nature in the media (e.g. idyllic portrayals inadvertising), this sort of finding suggests clear reservations about relying on themedia as an adequate source of education on environmental issues, either toinform children directly or indirectly through their parents.
Another cause for concern is the finding that children's assessment of theseverity of environmental problems tends to increase with the distance away theyare perceived to be. Several studies (MORI, 1993; Uzzell et al., 1995) havefound that children rate distant global problems as more serious than local onesand that they tend not to make connections between local action and globaleffects. It has been argued that this results in a sense of individual powerless-ness, which in turn can lead to a wane in interest in environmental issues.Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that current trends in environmentaleducation which orientate it around scientific understanding, even if it isacquired through first hand investigation of the environment, can be unhelpfulin this regard. Uzzell, for example, points out that measuring air pollutioncaused by cars is not to engage with the environmental problem, but one of itssymptoms. The problem is the set of values and attitudes which lead us to behavetowards the environment in certain ways and contextualising environmentaleducation in a purely 'natural' rather than a social setting leaves this invisible.Thus it has been argued (Bonnett, 1997) that central to environmental edu-cation is not the development of scientific understanding emphasised by theNational Curriculum, but the potentially more difficult and politically sensitivetask of helping children to develop a more sophisticated and critical under-standing of the values that inform everyday life.
Finally, and related to the above, the UK National Curriculum emphasis onscience and geography (National Curriculum Council, 1990; School Cur-riculum and Assessment Authority, 1996) as vehicles for environmentaleducation is open to the further criticism that such traditional subject disciplinesmay hinder environmental education, for the following reasons.
(1) The central issues of environmental education quintessentially trans-cend discipline boundaries (e.g. at the very basic level of involving bothfacts and values).
(2) Current scientific disciplines and general academic outlook are largelya product of a social history which pre-dates what are now recognisedas environmental issues. Thus their inherent attitudes and underlyinginterests remain essentially innocent of such concerns and awareness.This carries the danger that the self-interest of the discipline (and its
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practitioners) will distract from environmental problems and this mayimpede the ability of pupils to bring together all sides of the argument(Pozernik, 1995). (See also Tomlins & Froud, 1994, p. 18, for anindication of how in secondary schools, even in the subjects throughwhich environmental education is to be delivered, subject-orientatedinterests remain overriding.)
(3) Analysis of some of the motives which lie at the heart of modernscience reveals an aggressiveness which can be in tension with the kindof respect for nature that some would argue should lie at the heart ofenvironmental education (Merchant, 1992, ch. 2; Bonnett, 1997).
In the light of the above, there seem to be strong arguments for primaryschools to reappraise their approach and to devise an educational programmewhich focuses systematically on environmental concerns—both explicitly and interms of the tacit culture which may be embedded in curriculum knowledge andschool practices.
Now an important preliminary to investigating the ways in which schoolsmay convey messages about the environment is to gain some insight intochildren's existing attitudes and conceptual schema in terms of which theyunderstand nature and the environment. Only on this basis is it possible to beginto understand what, for the children, will count as a 'message' and how it islikely to be interpreted. And while attitudes are far from constituting a sufficientcondition for action (Ungar, 1994), there is evidence to suggest that as far as theimmediate precursors of action are concerned, specific environmental beliefsand decisions are indeed conditioned by more primitive beliefs about nature andour relationship to it (Stern et al., 1995).
WHAT DO CHILDREN THINK?
A fair amount of research into children's knowledge of the environment andassociated issues has been mounted, though there has been a tendency to focuson secondary age pupils (see for example Campbell & Chang, 1997, for a recentreview) and on specific issues rather than underlying orientations to nature andthe environment. Nonetheless, earlier work undertaken in the US has shownthat young children are capable of engaging with environmental issues both interms of assimilating relevant concepts and thinking about appropriate actionwhich they and others might take (Bryant & Hungerford, 1977). A more recentstudy (Palmer, 1995) of 4- and 6-year-old children in both the UK and the USfound that many 4-year-olds know a good deal about their environment andthat, for example, 65% of 6-year-olds could explain the basic concept ofrecycling with some accuracy.
The question arises, then, as to the ways in which such understandingdevelops during the remainder of the primary phase and under what influences.While it is always perilous to generalise from small scale research to larger
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populations and from specific responses to underlying orientations, some fairlydetailed qualitative exploration of a relatively small sample of children's viewscan reveal some of the possibilities inherent in their development and broaderissues that are raised. With this in mind, a pilot study of children's perceptionsof and attitudes towards nature and the environment as they approached theend of the primary phase of their education was mounted.
Homerton Pilot Study: research method
To maximise the variety of ways in which children could express themselves andto encourage them to communicate frankly, using their own phraseology andframework of understanding, group interviews were used. As Kitzinger noted'... people's knowledge and attitudes are not entirely encapsulated in reasonedresponses to direct questions. Everyday forms of communication such as anec-dotes, jokes or loose word association may tell us as much, if not more, aboutwhat people know and thus group interviews have the potential to reveal'dimensions of understanding that often remain untapped by the more conven-tional one-to-one interview or questionnaire' (1994, p. 109). Furthermore, suchgroup interviews can give insight into the extent to which a common view is held(Fielding, 1993).
Interviews were conducted in the summer term of 1997 in four EastAnglian primary schools in rural and urban locations. Two parallel interviewswith groups of four or six Year 5/6 pupils were conducted in each school. Thegroups were mostly mixed sex. Each interview lasted approximately 50 minutesand was tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. The children did not know inadvance what the subject matter of the interviews was to be and at the start ofeach interview we explained that we were interested in their own views and thatthere were no wrong answers.
Each interview began with the children being asked to draw a picture oftheir favourite place. Next they were asked to list the sorts of things in generalthat worry them and they would like to see changed or stopped and then thesorts of things that they think are important and would be upset about if theychanged or stopped (adapted from Cade, 1989). These drawing and writtenexercises were used for a number of reasons: as a 'warm up' exercise (each childwas asked in turn to talk about what they had drawn); as a way of giving thechildren a variety of ways in which to express themselves; as an attempt to seethe extent to which, unsolicited, the environment arose as a concern andwhether or not any of the children would consider nature when thinking abouttheir favourite place.
Throughout the rest of the discussions photographs were used as a talkingpoint, primarily as an attempt to initiate discussion while minimising theimposition of our terms of reference and understandings of words. In this waywe hoped to benefit from seeing how the children themselves used terms like'nature' and 'environment'. (See Leach et ah, 1995, for a similar approach inrelation to children's ideas about ecology.)
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The photographs were ordered in a way such that the conversation couldbe guided from more general consideration of nature to more specific environ-mental issues. If the children spontaneously raised issues themselves, which theyoften did, then the pictures were not necessarily shown and the ordering notstrictly kept to. The photographs depicted woodland, a meadow with wildflowers, fields with a gate in the foreground, a man sitting down and lookingtowards some mountains, a man cutting down a tree, litter on a beach, boyscouts planting a tree and some adults and children putting bottles in a bottlebank. In an attempt to minimise the extent to which we structured the length,detail and content of the children's responses an interview guide of open endedand neutral questions was used flexibly.
Analysis was qualitative and computer based. The NUD.IST package(non-numerical unstructured data indexing, searching and theorizing) was usedto explore the transcripts, index text and develop categories.
Homerton Pilot Study: findings
Children's Perceptions of Nature
The children seemed to understand nature in a number of ways, but foremostof these was nature characterised as 'living things'. There was some disagree-ment about whether or not people should be regarded as being part of nature.Some proposed that nature refers only to plants and not animals or people. Yetfor many animals appeared to be inseparable from any consideration of nature:
You can have special nature reserves and sometimes if you go thereand you can be really quiet you can see some nature and things....Yeah, because I went with my friend and we saw like a deer about thisbig going along a path. (Boy)
My back garden's got lots of nature in it and everything. I play in thereall the time and it has squirrels in it and everything. (Boy)
Those that spoke of people as being part of nature offered various reasons,including: people are animals too; people have similar needs to animals; peopleand animals are mutually dependent.
We need shelter and if we don't get like food and water we'll die likeanimals will. (Boy)
They help us live and we help them live. (Girl)
Interestingly, the notion of nature as 'living things' was sometimes qualified withthe criterion that what is living be 'something that's grown by itself and hasn'tbeen planted' and it was clear that some children were beginning to operate witha notion of degrees of naturalness, with wild and uncultivated places beingthought of as pre-eminently natural and cultivated fields less so, but morenatural than towns or motorways (the later frequently being cited as the epitome
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of 'not nature'). One child spoke of lack of cultivation being a sign that suchfields were not owned and she, with others, clearly associated the idea of'natural' with freedom from control or interference. In this regard, though,many children did not distinguish between animals that are living in the wildand animals that are reared for human consumption.
Overall, it was clear that the children had strong feelings that nature was adistinct part of their life-world, somewhat set apart from and to be contrastedwith other aspects. This image was reflected in their feelings of its worth.
Ways in Which Nature is Important
The children tended to associate being in 'natural places' with relaxation. Theysaid that they would feel peaceful and calm in places such as the woodland andmeadow. These feelings were associated with appreciation of the beauty of suchplaces, the quiet and the privacy: 'I'd like to go there because it isn't touchedand there's not many people there' (girl). One of the children suggested that aperson's appreciation of a natural place may vary according to their mood:
It doesn't look as fun as you'd think as a theme park and stuff but insome ways it's nicer, if you're in that kind of mood to go and relax andstuff. (Girl)
Several of the children's descriptions of such settings emphasised that they canserve as an escape or sanctuary from everyday life and troubles:
If you'd just had a row, you could go off and if you sat up there orsomething you could have a nice view. (Boy)
You get away from your troubles.... (Boy)
I think it's important that people should have somewhere calm andpeaceful to go to, not just having a busy life all the time. (Girl)
However, some of the children reacted to the woodland and meadow picturesby saying that they would be bored in such places. Such comments were usuallymade by boys, but some of the girls also said that they would not want to stayfor long.
Children tended to compare the woodland and meadow in terms of theirsuitability for playing games, indicating that their evaluation of places washeavily conditioned by what they felt they could do there. The woodland wasdescribed as 'good for tree houses' and 'a place where loads of kids would goand play hide and seek'. The meadow was seen as being less suitable for playingin, as running around would involve trampling on the long grass and wildflowers. Activities were frequently qualified in terms of avoiding damage ordisruption, suggesting that an underlying respect for things themselves paral-leled their more instrumental motives.
The children's comments about their drawings of their favourite place alsoreflected the tendency to judge places in terms of how they function as a site for
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leisure activity. Only five of the 36 participating children explicitly referred tonature when explaining what they liked about their favourite place, but justunder a third of them drew places which were out of doors and could roughlybe labelled 'natural'. Interestingly, bedrooms, which was the place most fre-quently identified by the girls and the second most popular with the boys, likenatural places, were chosen for the peace, freedom and sense of safety theyoffered.
However, some of the children's reactions to imagining being in thewoodland or meadow revealed that natural places can be associated withdangers, such as being mugged, and a consequent sense of anxiety about beingthere alone.
The Meaning of 'Environment'
Like 'nature', the term 'environment' was understood by the children in anumber of ways. For many it had the sense of referring to everything, 'theworld', 'the earth', even 'the universe'. A more specific meaning was identifiedby three of the children: the surroundings within which humans or animals live.This understanding incorporated the notion of the built environment:
Isn't the environment, like people say, 'what kind of environment arewe living in?' Isn't it things like, you can have an environment like acity which is really busy, really fumes everywhere or the countrysidewhich is pretty and you get fresh air and stuff. (Girl)
Houses are an environment where we live. Trees is an environmentwhere birds and animals live. (Boy)
Well environment really means like what's around you and the type ofthings that things need to grow and things like that. (Girl)
However, other comments suggested that the word was more readily associatedwith the natural world rather than the man-made: 'Well you don't exactly go"Oh look ... this chair's the environment" because it's been made' (girl). Theterm environment was also described as signifying a state of being:
... the environment means like a place, what it's like really. Anenvironment ... what sort of place it is and is it nice or is it not nice.(Boy)
Sometimes the environment was spoken of more as a set of concerns orproblems or as something to be managed:
Is it the stuff that we're supposed to take care of? Like, 'cos if we didn'ttake care of it some things like trees could die and flowers and wildlife?(Girl)
It could even become synonymous with activities aimed at overcoming ordealing with problems or concerns: 'The environment is all about recycling andpicking your rubbish up' (girl).
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Clearly, for some children the term has become so heavily associated withthe problematical contexts in which it arises in teaching that the moral andemotional connotations it has acquired there have come to dominate itsmeaning.
The Children's Views on Ways in Which the Environment is Important
Throughout the discussions the children showed a high degree of concern withthe welfare of animals. Nature was said to be important because it is whereanimals live and animals have a right to live undisturbed in their 'homes'.Indeed some of the children argued that animals' lives should be valued just ashuman life is valued:
Well they're just as important as we are and they need food and that,and they've got a life to live and so have we. (Boy)They're a kind of person theirself. They're just like us if you reallythink about it ... they've got their own way of speaking and they're justa normal living thing. (Girl)
This attribution of intrinsic worth to animals and the application of moralconcepts like fairness and equality to their treatment suggests a strong biocentricelement to their thinking. On occasion, this was also extended to plants:
It wouldn't be fair to cut like the trees down when they're like growingand things because it's just like us being killed really, because they'rejust being. If they're cut down then it's just like they're losing their life.(Girl)
When considering the issue of litter and trees being cut down, the childrenoften described scenarios of ways in which particular animals might be en-dangered or their way of life disrupted, but some of the children also spoke ofthe impact of cutting down trees on animals in a more general sense, implyingan understanding that certain species may depend on particular habitats: 'Someof the creatures only live in the rainforest and they don't live anywhere else'(girl).
In addition to its connections with the welfare of animals, the environmentwas quite emphatically described by many of the pupils as critical to the survivalof the human race. 'You need it (the environment) to live really' (boy). 'Youwouldn't be alive (without it)' (boy). In one school the pupils reacted to thepicture of a tree being cut down quite passionately. Two of them said that it was'suicide'. In other schools pupils' initial reactions were similarly unequivocal:cutting down trees is wrong, 'nasty' and can make them 'angry'.
The importance of trees had clearly registered with them and manyattempted to explain why:
They give you oxygen. I can't remember ... I think what we breath out,they take in and what they breath out we take in. So it's like a circlereally. (Boy)
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That the environment is important because of how it can affect our healthwas mentioned by two of the children in terms of asthma being related to carfumes. A few of the children also referred to the environment as being importantbecause 'man needs things like animals to live so we can eat them'. This vestedinterest in the survival of animals was, however, mentioned less frequently thanthe more general concern that animals have a right to live for their own sake.
Alongside their concern for the welfare of trees, some children spoke of howthey are used as a resource (for paper and furniture, a few also suggested fuel)and how land clearance for building or cultivation may be reasons why trees arecut down. They recognised that such 'needs' conflict with people's dependenceon trees for oxygen and the well-being of animals, but this tended to beexpressed in very abstract terms, with little sense of what might be involved inweighing up priorities in differing circumstances.
Awareness of Environmental Problems
When, towards the beginning of the interview and before any reference to theenvironment had been made, the children were invited to list things which worrythem, approximately a third noted environmental issues, such as trees being cutdown, extinction, 'the amount of cars nowadays', litter and pollution, as sourcesof personal anxiety. Similarly, when the children were asked to list things whichare important to them 'animals' were noted by just under half of the girls. Eithertrees, 'if there were more roads and smoke', or recycling were noted by three ofthe 17 girls and the rainforest or trees were referred to by four of the 19 boys.To some extent these findings reflect an emerging picture: Cade (1989) foundthat environmental concerns were in the majority when children were askedabout their feelings towards the world around them and Hicks & Holden (1995)found environmental concerns to be very prominent amongst 6-18-year-oldswho were asked about their hopes and fears for the future.
The children appeared to be very aware of and in favour of recycling,particularly paper. The connection between recycling paper and 'saving' treesappeared to be straightforward. However, although the children were aware thatitems other than paper can be recycled, naming bottles, cans and plastic asexamples, they appeared to be unsure as to how such recycling helps theenvironment. Similarly, some of the children's comments about the conse-quences of not recycling suggest that its underlying purpose is not entirely clearto them: 'There'd be like probably a real high rubbish ... all the world would bea rubbish tip' (boy). Further, a strong holistic sense that somehow everything isinterconnected seemed sometimes to inhibit children from distinguishingseparate strands within the overall picture. A parallel observation was made byQuaker et al. (1995) investigating primary school children's understanding ofthe greenhouse effect: anything which was environmentally damaging wasconsidered to contribute to all environmental problems.
Somewhat in contrast to research previously cited, the children did notappear to particularly regard environmental problems as being distantly located
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in foreign countries or view them as being somehow unrelated to their everydaylives (as distinct, perhaps, from their own actions). In fact, they rarely locatedenvironmental problems geographically or nationally; for instance treesappeared to be considered important per se. Litter and rubbish being dumped inpublic places were highlighted by children at two of the three schools where weasked whether there were any particular local problems. Some children spon-taneously told stories of having witnessed or having been told about other'problems' in a variety of places, suggesting that they regard environmentalproblems as being pervasive.
Sources of Influence
School, parents and relatives, Guides and Cubs and certain forms of media wereidentified by the children as influences and sources of knowledge and under-standing. Across the schools the children noted that they had done projects,including recycling, pollution, the rainforests, 'doing habitats' and 'materials'.Such comments suggest that the children were making connections acrosssubject areas—recognising when they were learning about the environment—thus qualifying reservations expressed earlier about a subject-based approach,but it was noticeable that social dimensions to problems were rarely mentionedand there was never any reference to arts subjects. Few offered details aboutprojects they had done and school trips were rarely mentioned in the context ofhow the children had found out about things, although they were mentioned(along with Guides and Cubs) in relation to learning about the Country Codeand in terms of having been to places like those depicted in some of thephotographs.
A few of the children described the recycling that their parents do and onegirl emphasised that children's behaviour is shaped by the example of theirparents:
Some people's parents don't (recycle) and so people just think 'Oh,well, it doesn't matter about me'. So when you're out by yourself andyou have a Coke can and most people aren't really likely to bring it allthe way home to recycle it. (Girl)
Television programmes were cited as important sources of information.'Newsround' was specifically mentioned a number of times, as were 'BluePeter', 'Tomorrow's World' and nature programmes. When talking about treesbeing used for paper one group of children discussed Michael Jackson's videofor 'Earth Song', which they thought had good special effects and depicted 'howimportant it is' and might 'encourage people because it looks really horriblewhen all the trees are cut down'. Others also noted how they sometimes foundout about things by coming across written information posted in public places,such as in the library and next to recycling skips.
Very few of the children's comments suggested that they are aware thatpeople's attitude and behaviour towards the environment may be linked to
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economic considerations or more general sets of values. However, one childdescribed how having to earn a living when you grow up can lead to theinterested and caring attitude that people have when they are young beingdisplaced:
You've got to admit that some, most, some people yeah, like theirMums when they're about ten years old say 'Oh would you like toplant a sunflower?'. And then when they grow up and they're like onthe streets and they're not doing nothing and someone goes 'All rightmate, do you want a job to cut down some trees?', they'll say 'yeah'.And then they ... earlier on when they were ten years old, theywould've been trying to help. (Boy)
Two other children suggested that adults are less caring about the environmentthan children.
The children appeared to have a strong sense that individual behaviourshould be influenced by considering 'what if everyone did it' and a number ofthe children's comments attributed the general lack of recycling and thedropping of litter to personal laziness, though some noted that behaviour can beinfluenced by practicalities, such as scarcity of pavement litter bins and the wayrecycling campaigns come and go:
Most people are just writing on like one side of a piece of paper andthen they don't want it and then they throw it away but you couldrecycle it. You could put it in a recycle thing. But there isn't ... a longtime ago they used to do the ... Blue Peter did their recycling of thepaper and the magazines and stuff and there was recycling bins to putthat in and now, I can't.... I've got loads of scrap paper now and Idon't know where to put it. (Girl)
The interaction between two of the children in one of the interviewssuggested that publicly expressing a caring attitude can run the risk of beingregarded as overly virtuous. One boy teasingly called a girl 'Mother Nature' and'Mrs Nature'. When asked why, he said 'Because she's so caring about all theseanimals'. Later this girl tried to shake off this image. When asked to look at thepicture showing some boy scouts planting a tree, the girl said that what theywere doing made them 'goody goodies'. Later, when recycling was beingdiscussed, she commented a number of times that 'It's always the environment.Why can't it just be for yourself? ... Everyone just does it for the environmentnot for themselves'.
In general, however, expressing strong positive concern about the environ-ment carried a high degree of consensus and we detected no significantdifference in general attitude on this between urban and rural schools. [Otherresearch with 11-year-olds (Williams & McCorrie, 1990) has suggested thatrural children have a higher degree of 'environmental consciousness'].
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DISCUSSION
Main Elements in Children's Conceptions of 'Nature' and 'the Environ-ment'
As this sample of children approached the end of the primary phase of theireducation they demonstrated high levels of feeling and general concern towardsnature and the environment. The following aspects to their understanding seemparticularly salient.
(1) They saw nature as something set apart from the main business of lifeand yet, as human beings, they felt themselves in some sense to be partof it. For them nature had associations of freedom and wilderness andnatural places were viewed as a sanctuary from the business of everydaylife. Yet, at another level, they had a clear sense of being bound in withnatural processes and of interdependence with other aspects of nature,particularly once the notion of 'the environment' arose in the conver-sation.
(2) They felt a strong empathy towards certain aspects of nature, particu-larly 'animals' and trees (there were no direct references to, forexample, insects or physical nature nor to nature as 'red in tooth andclaw'), and once associated with the idea of 'the environment' strongprotective feelings were invoked.
(3) There seemed to be a strong moral component to their relationshipwith aspects of nature. This arose from a notion that the life of animals,and even plants, has central elements common to their own andtherefore is of intrinsic worth and deserves equal consideration to thelife of humans. However, there seemed to be little appreciation of thefundamental implications of this for current priorities and everydaypractices. And while they were aware of potential conflicts of interestbetween nature and human needs, this awareness had a ratheracademic and abstract quality, with little sense of what might beinvolved in coming to resolutions.
(4) The signs of image consciousness, of appearing too pro-environmental,suggested incipient reservations about conforming to something that isnow perceived as a conventional virtue, at least within school culture.
(5) 'The environment' came across as a very global term, signifying ideasof place, relationship and interdependence; it also carried strong con-notations of problems and concern. Such problems and their perceivedremedies were articulated very much in terms of individual responsi-bility, there being very little reference to social and structural elementsand none to the responsibilities of collectives, such as corporations,governments or society as a whole.
(6) Their understanding of issues tended to be emotionally charged andholistic. In fact, 'syncretic' might be a more accurate term, in that theyoften failed to differentiate different strands of interconnectednesswithin their overall conceptions.
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(7) The aesthetic qualities of nature were rarely mentioned, although theymay have been implicit to some extent in the characterisation of naturalplaces as being 'peaceful'.
In sum, the children's understanding of and relationship to nature and theenvironment could be characterised in terms of a number of related dichotomiesand ambivalences:
(a) in what sense (s) are they part of nature and how does this relate to thesocial world in which they for the most part live?
(b) how do they reconcile the anthropocentric and biocentric aspects oftheir relationship with nature?
(c) how do they understand the relationships between limited individualactions and global consequences?
(d) why do their high levels of emotional response not seem to translateinto high levels of personal participation in environmental action?
(e) how do they reconcile their current positive attitudes towards natureand the environment with their sense that such attitudes may changewhen they confront the realities of life as adults?
It may be important to help children to address such dichotomies if they are toavoid assuming discreet ethical positions in relation to 'real life' (or adult life)contrasted with a hived off 'nature'—with the consequence of everyday practicesremaining untouched by the later or, as the more prominent frame of mind,beginning to set the tone for it in conflict situations. The dangers of, forexample, undermining a moral stance towards environmental action by're-framing' it in terms of appeals to personal gain are well documented byThogersen (1996). In his extensive review of the literature on motives forrecycling he observes that such behaviour is initially perceived as falling in themoral domain and is performed for the intrinsic satisfaction of frugality andparticipation. When attempts were made to encourage recycling by offeringextrinsic rewards, such as money, recycling was shifted into the economicdomain, with a resultant undermining of a sense of moral obligation and a needfor rewards large enough to make the activity worthwhile in personal economicterms. Similarly, he found that rewards that acknowledged the actor's intrinsicmotivation and were thus perceived as tokens of approval would strengthen thismotivation, whereas rewards perceived as payments weakened it.
Some Further Policy and Research Considerations
In addition to the general concerns expressed above, a number of more specificconsiderations relevant to school policy making suggest themselves. Perhaps thechief of these is how to consolidate children's general positive attitudes whileavoiding an uncritical 'bandwagon' effect in which a more sober evaluation ofthe issues is overlooked. Seeking to achieve realism here might lead schools toexamine the roles of discussion and action in their pedagogical strategies.
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Discussion (including addressing environmental dilemmas, for example, asexpressed in relevant case studies) may have a special role as a vehicle forchildren to explore and articulate their understandings and to develop responseswhich are both more qualified and more genuinely their own in the sense ofbeing evaluated in terms of their own existence (Bonnett, 1994). Through suchdiscussion children have an opportunity to consolidate and systematise theirunderstanding of the ways in which concepts like 'nature' and 'the environment'have different senses appropriate to different contexts and to explore and toevaluate the underlying social values and purposes, such as consumerism, whichshape our attitudes and actions in everyday life. In an admittedly small study,Jaus (1984) records an instance of where as little as two hours of discussion-based lessons aimed at affect as much as cognition led to positive effectson children's attitudes towards the environment which were still apparentcompared with a control group two years later.
Action-based strategies point to potential benefits of involving children inundertaking environmental audits, in developing realistic action plans, partici-pating in and/or setting up community enterprises. The need for a range ofongoing environmental practices in the school which do not fade away when atopic has been covered also deserves consideration.
In significant respects environmental education involves the development ofa certain general frame of mind—indeed a way of life—which raises manybroader issues: what implications are there for children's emotional, moral,social and spiritual education; what contributions might literature, the arts,drama make to environmental understanding and commitment; to what extentdoes the general ethos of the school reinforce a caring attitude and morecontemplative turn of mind; is knowledge enough? This question perhapssummarises a central issue for environmental education: what degree of inter-vention should teachers undertake in the formation of a child's outlook? Shouldchildren simply be given relevant information and then be left to form their ownattitudes? Should they be helped to clarify their own ideas and values throughdiscussion, etc? Should there be a deliberate attempt to guide them towards aparticular set of fundamental values and behaviours, in which case, what arethey, how are they justified and what do they imply for the curriculum as awhole and the school ethos?
Such issues suggest avenues for further research, both empirical andphilosophical. The aspects of children's understanding revealed in the pilotstudy need to be confirmed and refined through a larger sample and to bepursued longitudinally. It would be useful, too, to explore the influence onchildren's attitudes of perceptions of image and stages in their life cycle byexploring the range of views children think others hold towards the environ-ment. Analysis of the relationship of basic attitudes towards nature and theenvironment and other attitude clusters would be relevant to the issue of linkingenvironmental education with other curriculum areas, such as PSE. All of thiswould be usefully complemented by a study of primary teachers' views on theimportance of environmental education and the effectiveness of differing
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approaches to it. Finally, it would be important to investigate the hiddencurriculum: the models of attitudes towards nature and the environmentembedded in school and classroom practices and resources (Bonnett, 1997).
POSTSCRIPT
An overwhelming impression given during the interviews was that the childrenhad strong feelings about, and were highly motivated to discuss, the issues weexplored with them. On almost every occasion they would have been happy forthe interviews to have continued beyond the time available. This lends supportto the idea that environmental education is a potentially rich vein to developwith children, not simply for its own sake (highly important as that is), butbecause it provides excellent opportunities for children to think through andexpress their own views and to apply knowledge that they may have acquiredelsewhere in the curriculum to issues which concern them. In this way they maycome to a better understanding of both themselves and what they have learnt.We are greatly indebted to the schools and the children involved for theopportunity they gave us to begin to explore this terrain.
Correspondence: Michael Bonnett, Homerton College, Hills Road, CambridgeCB2 2PH, UK.
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