What could and should ecological civilization education be?

Abstract

With the promotion of the term “ecological civilization” by the Chinese government, ecological civilization education (ECE) has gradually become popular in China. However, the concept of ECE remains unclear. In this commentary, we construct three triple-property models considering theories from environmental education (EE) to interpret ECE’s goals, program design perspectives, and learning outcomes. We suggest that the content of ECE can be replaced with the concept of EE, and that the three models implicit in EE can be utilized to establish an integrated landscape of ECE or EE per se.