Copyright 1999 Mauri Åhlberg and Patrick Dillon
 
 
 
 
 

Preface

What follows is work done by Professor Mauri Åhlberg (University of Joensuu in Savonlinna, FINLAND) and Dr. Patrick Dillon (University of Reading, UNITED KINGDOM) in and for the EU DGXI-project co-ordinated by Professors Miranda Pilo and Mario de Paz. (University of Genoa, ITALY) . The material is allowed to be copied in this project as needed e.g. for the Summer Course in Rimini 1999 . All copyrights however remain and are reserved by the authors. They may be transferred from them only by legal agreements, in which authors also do want to retain all rights, including copyrights for the material.
 

Contents

Introduction

Instructions to the use of study material

Basic ways to approach problems and issues in life, in environmental education,
in quality of life

High quality learning

Continual quality improvement

Quality tools to promote Continual Quality Improvement and High quality Learning

A theory of Integrating Education

Instructional strategies, methods and materials to promote Environmental Education

Evaluation for sustainable development

References
 

Introduction

The purpose of the project is to construct and test material for constructivistic Environmental Education. The material which follows is written for pre-service and in-service teacher education (training, formation). It has been extensively tried in Finland by hundreds of pre-service and in-service teachers. The main body of the material has been distributed to all partners of this EU-project during the Summer Course in Finland in 1998. In England the value of material is understood and Dr. Patrick Dillon agreed to co-operate in testing and improving it. Some partners from Southern Europe thought that the material is too theoretical. However it is well-known fact that nothing is so practical as a good theory. This material is intellectually demanding, but so are the big environmental problems facing us.

The humankind, each country and each individual at present and as far as we are able to think has at least two main concerns: Globalisation of economy caused by accelerating scientific and technological evolution, and increase of competitiveness as a result of this development. Environmental problems caused by both Nature and human impacts, e. g. increase of human populations and increasing traffic, pollution, increasing dumping of carbon dioxide and methane into atmosphere etc.

The only way to survive and prosper in present world and to construct a better society, to acquire higher quality of life, is to promote learning of higher quality, continually improve all organisations, key processes, products and services. A more integrating approach to education and management is needed.

Education nowadays is mostly divided into subject teaching and narrow courses. Time is divided into lessons. The result is still often fragmented, superficial learning and ritualistic repeating word by word what has been taught or what is in textbooks.

In this material we present a better option. Education ought to more concentrate to real authentic problems of environment and quality of life. Probably every field of culture, every science included, has something to contribute about environment and quality of life. These have been many efforts to approach environmental problems, quality of life included by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways. The result is often a static integrative or comprehensive framework. We suggest a more active integrating approach: continual integration in high quality learning, which is presented as a part of continual quality improvement. Both of them are promoted by integrating education and management. So three tentative theories will be presented: A theory of high quality learning, a theory of continual quality improvement and a theory of integrating education and management. Many people are afraid of theories. We will show how theory construction is a natural human characteristic, a part of high quality learning, thinking and acting and there is nothing to be afraid of.

Our approach is not post-modernism, post-structuralism, or any other movement which happens to be in fashion. Discourse for discourse sake is not what we are aiming at. The world and human life are complex, full of real issues and problems waiting to become solved. We need best theories and intellectual tools available in order to prosper. Our approach can be characterised by the following theses strongly adapted from Bunge (1983, 270):
1) Critical scientific realism: The world exists independently regardless of researchers. A researcher may learn parts and     aspects of the world. Human beings are part of the world. Other human beings are a part of environment for an individual. The world is a system. If there were a part of the world which is not in some how connected to rest of the world we could not have any possibility of getting any knowledge of it.
2) Historicism: All research starts from some tradition, which it either broadens e.g. by integrating with other research tradition   and/or corrects.
3) Moderate rationalism: Reason and rationality are necessary for knowing, knowledge construction.
4) Moderate empiricism: Experiences are necessary in order to increase and correct knowledge about the world.
5) Constructivism: There are no concepts and theories ready-made in nature. All concepts and theories are made by humans whether they represent reality or not.
6) Representation: Sciences produce a symbolic representation of the world.
7) Practice: Technology helps change the world.
8) Justificationism: Every claim and every proposal must be justified by reason or experience or by both of them.
9) Fallibilism: Every part of factual knowledge, data or hypothesis, may be fallible. All human knowledge is tentative, prone to continual testing, cross-examination, scrutiny.
10)  Meliorism: All factual knowledge may be improved, so that it corresponds more to reality. Factual knowledge may be defined as a well justified and as far truthlike belief as possible, based on best evidence available.
11) Scientism: Everything that is possible to know and worth knowing may be known by using scientific approach and technology better than in any other way. In human sciences there is often no other way for a researcher or researchers to construct knowledge than to use herself or himself as an instrument to collect data. Science is self-correcting way of constructing knowledge. All of its parts including assumptions may be checked any time. Continual checking and rechecking belongs into scientific approach. There is nothing wrong in using intuition, but results of intuition are checked against truthfulness in science and against efficiency in technology.
12) Systemism or better integrativism: The world is the biggest system known. All theories and part theories of the world are conceptual systems, which try to represent the world or part of it. Because there is one common world and all our factual conceptions and theories are about this world, there is nothing wrong in trying to integrate different “-isms” and theories as long as the result is a coherent whole.
 

Instructions to the use of study material

We always first present some tasks or questions. It is suggested that you seriously first do what is asked. We usually ask the reader to think herself or himself about the issue, to construct her or his own answer to the issue or problem, then to compare her/his conception or tentative theory to our tentative theory, based on years of intellectual work, scrutiny, continual testing of all assumptions, and conclusions. One general learning objective of our material is to learn a scientific constructivistic way of learning, thinking and acting in relation to environmental problems and issues.

There are many different versions of constructivism. Most of them do not make any difference between constructing tales, stories and on the other hand constructing scientific knowledge, which is always tentative, prone to continual testing and checking and rechecking, examination and cross-examination. Our version of constructivism is the kind which is coherent with our critical scientific approach as described above.