Structuring environmental education — A strathclyde model

Summary

One of the serious problems which beset those who try to introduce courses in environmental education into the school curriculum is that of showing how such a wide array of topics and activities as is now available can be structured into a single course with clear objectives and an approach and methodology common to the whole range of material. This paper describes a model which has been developed in the west of Scotland by a group of teachers and others representing many academic disciplines, and has been successfully tested with secondary pupils in the 14 to 16 age range; it is believed that this model can accommodate all of the topics which might be included in such a course, and provide a means of unifying course objectives and methods and of assessing its effectiveness. It is structured around a set of five key questions which are amplified to fit the topic and circumstances in which they are applied. Some success has been achieved with the use of the model in secondary schools both in true interdisciplinary courses and within traditional subjects, and it may also offer a structure for problem-based teaching in post-school education. The circumstances in which the model originated and the process by which it was developed are described as a case history of a multidisciplinary group, informal in its composition, designing innovative work within a formal system.