UZZELL: EDUCATION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION IN THE COMMUNITY 1 Education for Environmental Action in the Community: New Roles and Relationships 1 David Uzzell Department of Psychology, University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, GU2 5XH, UK Tel: +44 1483 259430; Fax: +44 1483 259553; Email: d.uzzell@surrey.ac.uk Children are regarded as a key audience for environmental messages. It is part of the rhetoric of concern about global environmental problems that children are seen as ‘tomorrow’s opinion leaders and stewards of the earth’. However, many environmental problems are immediate and require action today. It is adults who need to institute and engage in changed behaviours - adults who are parents but who are also consumers, industrialists, community leaders, educators and policy and decision-makers in all walks of life. But is there a role for children in changing the environmental attitudes and behaviours of adults? If children are to play a critical role in educating parents to behave in more environmentally sustainable ways, then environmental education ought to be the key that unlocks this door. All the evidence suggests, however, that it does not, cannot and will not have this effect until we change our understanding of the nature of environmental education and how it should be taught and learnt. We may also need to change the nature of the teaching/learning relationship between adults and children. I would like to suggest five problematic areas which act as constraints and barriers on environmental education, action and change by adults and children. 1. Environmental education is invariably based on a teaching and learning model which is top-down and centre to periphery Traditional models of social influence have assumed that adults’ influence children’s attitudes and knowledge in a unidirectional and asymmetrical manner, while children are regarded as passive recipients with minority status. Teachers, environmental experts and parents are examples of (supposedly informed) groups whose role is to educate children to a particular understanding of the world. This is the basis of Moscovici’s (1976) functional model of social influence (Figure 1). But the problem with this model is, of course, that despite the activities of environmental groups, the government and academics over the past 20-30 years to make the public more environmentally conscious and adopt conservation oriented attitudes and behaviours, there is little evidence to suggest that this has been achieved on any widespread scale. It might be argued that changes in environmental behaviour have outpaced changes in environmental attitudes. Unfortunately, such environmental behaviour change has been limited to individual consumer actions which have not really addressed the major structural environmental problems faced by our society. Moscovici proposes a more realistic and desirable model of the social influence process, which can be readily applied to environmental education. Moscovici refers to this as the genetic model, the basic premise of which is that knowledge is not given but socially 1 Published in Cambridge Journal of Education, 29, 3, pp 397 - 413.