Teasing through a "Rhetoric of Integration": Moving Environmental Education from the Margins to the Mainstream

Overview & Synopsis

Environmental education in K-12 and initial teacher education contexts appears to be at a cross-roads despite UNESCO's declaration of its importance in educating future generations about the global challenges we face and our resistance to change the behaviours that create these conditions. This paper argues for the interdisciplinary status of environmental education, melding disciplinary with cross-curricular integrating attributes. Toward this aim, it exposes environmental education's "rhetoric of integration" effective in maintaining a status quo of marginalization. While environmental education generally operates on the margins, it can benefit by examining how other fields such as physical education have become effective interdisciplinary subjects, and how, by applying similar strategies it too can move from the margins to the mainstream.