Environmental learning and categories of interest: Exploring modes of participation and learning in a conservation NGO

Abstract

This chapter explores ideas of participation by considering some of the issues surrounding frameworks for environmental learning. We begin by reviewing a recent analysis of a range of categories of interest in environmental learning. This indicates that the people and groups who promote or encourage environmental learning can have widely differing assumptions about both its purposes and processes, and about participation by learners in both their learning and thence in any social action they might take. We develop this analysis by examining how that which might be expected of the learner and the teacher/instructor in such environmental learning processes, and in ensuant participatory social and/or environmental change, can vary markedly across categories. Keywords environmental learning, categories of interest, participation, conservation NGOs © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.