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Background Reading

The articles listed below give an idea of the background and theory behind education in botanic gardens, the focus on education for sustainability and the use of education to confront issues in conservation of biodiversity.

The School Garden: Education for Sustainable Living

The great challenge of our time is to create sustainable communities; communities designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economies, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavor must be to become ‘ecologically literate’ i.e. to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. Being ecologically literate, or ‘ecoliterate’ means understanding the basic principles of ecology and being able to embody them in the daily life of human communities.

To understand the principles of ecology, we need a new way of thinking, known in science as ‘systems thinking’. It means thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. In this article, the author shows how ecoliteracy can serve as a new framework for education in the twenty first century, and how growing a school garden is the ideal way for children to experience systems thinking and ecology in action. Gardening reconnects children to the fundamentals of food, indeed, to the fundamentals of life, while integrating and enlivening virtually every activity that takes place at a school.

Biodiversity as a Bridge between Nature Conservation and Education for Sustainability

Botanic gardens and glasshouses can play an important role in community based education for biodiversity. Education for biodiversity has the potential to link plant conservation to the development of sustainable communities. Biodiversity can be considered an ‘ill-defined’ concept, in that there is no one single perspective or definition of biodiversity that accurately describes it in all situations or contexts. It can have different meanings depending on the user of the term and the context in which it is used. Although being ill-defined is considered a weakness by some, it offers some worthwhile advantages from an environmental education perspective. These advantages are explored and linked to plant conservation and sustainable community development.

Presented is a stepping stone procedure for turning biodiversity into a meaningful and existentially relevant issue for people with diverging interests, needs and cultural backgrounds (van Weelie and Wals 1999). The procedure is illustrated by the case of the Urban Rainforest Trail.

Education for Sustainability: Some Questions for Reflection

It was the Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which alerted the world to the complex nature of the issues underlying environmental sustainability. Perhaps the most pertinent, was the increasing divergence between the northern ‘environment’ agenda and the ‘development’ agenda shared by the poorer nations. Many countries who were eager for economic development used the Summit to bring the world’s attention to the stark choices they face between development, environmental protection and the need to overcome poverty. However, the realisation at Rio that the existing development trends leave increasing numbers of people poor and vulnerable served to redefine and clarify the links between environment and development concerns.

Botanic Gardens and Education for Sustainability

Education for Sustainability (EfS) is a holistic approach to education which emphasises the interelationship of disciplines. There is high level acknowledgement of the importance of EfS. Both Caring for the Earth, (IUCN, 1991) and Agenda 21 (which emerged from the UNCED conference in 1992) clearly state that Education for Sustainability (EfS) should be the central goal of environmental education.

To challenge the dominant ways of thinking and behaving in society, which have resulted in our present state of global unsustainability, botanic gardens need to engage in 'stronger' forms of EfS - and this means education for sustainability.

Boring Botany? Rethinking Teaching about Plants in Schools

How can educators make plants visible in inspiring ways? Dawn Sanders argues for the importance and relevance of plant science and discusses ways the subject can be made to capture and maintain the attention of students, including using botanical gardens as educational resources.