Making environmental meaning

1st International School Congress "Environment, Health and Education". Braga, Portugal, 8-10 May, 2008.This presentation is about creating rich and complex meanings for the concept of "environment" in order to increase the life supporting function of a biologically and culturally diverse environment. It focuses on educators and learners in research about the meaning of environment and ecological identity. This presentation discusses two educational studies which take ecological approaches to research. These approaches acknowledge complexity and ambiguity within the continuing processes of knowledge construction and use qualitative methods including free expression, photographs, drawings, semi-structured and narrative interviews, and meditative visualizations. One of the studies worked with a "naïve" group, children from the ultra-peripheral region of the Azores archipelago. The other involved "experts", environmental educators from around the world who had much formal studies about the environment in higher education. Researchers in these studies followed phenomenographic and narrative arts-based approaches and through reflexive partnerships with research participants, they highlight diverse perspectives of the environment not regularly seen in the literature, as well as uncover the ways in which researchers can inadvertently analysis away much of this diversity. Like research, teaching deals directly with processes of knowledge construction. The lessons learned through these two research studies are explored for how teaching can be done in a way that also supports diverse perspectives on environment