Elusive participation: Methodological challenges in researching teaching and participatory learning in environmental education

Abstract

The purpose of this methodology-focused chapter is to consider the issues encountered in researching participation from the perspective of those subjectivities necessary for its occurrence in education and environmental education. It is one thing to discuss dilemmas of participatory education itself as a potential dwelling point for the conceptualisation of work in environmental education. It is quite another to consider where human predispositions for such work have come from. The chapter outlines a collaborative attempt to explore how a focused search for origins of meaning in environment- related practices of teachers has become constructed and disrupted as an inquiry process. My methodological interest is in the process of the inquiry as it emerged at the intersection of narrative interpretive methods to capture and represent evolving ways of knowing, and some obvious constraints and tensions concerning some fundamental conditions through which social processes are both generated and shaped. The chapter begins with an account of the basics of research processes that have spanned more than a decade of change in our thinking about such inquiry, in order to illustrate how initial assumptions about social reality are constructed (e.g. that environmental education, almost by definition, is a participatory process), and have re-emerged as questions concerning broadened contexts of meaning-making. The chapter concludes with a view of environmental education as a social practice, centred both on how teachers construct their school experiences and what this may mean for practical realities such as participation or participatory action within the institutions of education. Keywords environmental education, research, methodology, participation, learning © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.