The Learning Continuum in Environmental Education
The Learning Continuum
Scott and Gough (2003): four activity types
- Information: raise awareness and understanding (informal).
- Communication: open a dialogue to share experiences and plans (formal and informal).
- Education: build knowledge, concern, and the capacity to work with others.
- Capacity building: strengthen civil society’s ability to act (mainly informal).
Sound practice
Based on sound pedagogy and sound science.
How it should be taught
Hands-on, contextualised, and interdisciplinary, linking science, social science, the arts, and mathematics.
Environmental education is not one activity but a sequence of them. Education researchers Scott and Gough (2003) described this as a continuum: activities that can be used on their own but ideally build one upon the next, moving from simply knowing about a problem to building a whole community’s power to act on it.
Four Kinds of Activity
The continuum runs through four stages. Each one assumes the one before it.
| Stage | Aim | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| Information | Raise awareness and understanding | Informal |
| Communication | Open a dialogue between people and environmental agencies to share experiences, priorities, and plans | Formal and informal |
| Education | Build knowledge, understanding, concern, and the capacity to work with others toward goals | Formal and informal |
| Capacity building | Increase the ability of civil society to support and work for environmental care | Mainly informal |
Information comes first: a walk in a park, a visit to a zoo, seeing a drought or the state of the animals for yourself. This is where the seriousness of a situation starts to sink in. Communication follows, because knowing is not enough on its own. Once a person understands an issue, the next move is to let others know and to trade experiences with the groups already working on it.
The order matters, but the stages also loop back: talking to others often surfaces new information, which feeds the next round.
Information raises awareness and understanding; communication opens a dialogue.
Information is often informal, such as a park or zoo visit. Communication happens in both settings, letting people share experiences and plans with environmental groups.
From Educating to Building Capacity
Telling people about a problem cannot be the end. Education activities go further: they build knowledge, understanding, and a genuine attitude of concern, plus the motivation and ability to work with others toward a goal. This is where learners study what the environment is like now, what could improve it, and what a future looks like if nothing changes. It also widens the list of harms worth naming, past the obvious ones to things like noise, light, and visual pollution, the reason city skies rarely show stars.
Capacity building is the final stage, and it accepts a hard truth: no one can fix the environment alone. It works mainly in informal settings to strengthen the ability of civil society, the people and groups outside schools, to support and carry out the work. Here the aim is not only to inform and educate but to get people to join hands, practise the solutions, and change settled lifestyle habits, which is rarely easy.
Each stage carries the one before it further, so a strong programme does not stop at awareness or even at education.
Increase civil society’s ability to support and carry out environmental work.
It works mainly in informal settings, getting people and groups outside schools to join in, practise solutions, and change lifestyle habits over the long term.
Sound Pedagogy Meets Sound Science
At its best, environmental education rests on two supports at once: sound pedagogy and sound science. Science helps explain how the damage happened and what might repair it; pedagogy is the craft of teaching that so people actually learn it. One without the other falls short. Facts with no teaching skill do not reach anyone, and teaching skill with weak science spreads the wrong lesson.
Good practice is also hands-on, contextualised, and interdisciplinary. You cannot grasp environmental issues by reading and writing alone, so lessons put the topic in the learner’s own context and give them things to do. And because these problems are tangled, they pull in many subjects at once: natural science, social sciences such as economics and sociology, the arts, and mathematics all help explain the fuller picture.
The reason to combine subjects is practical, not decorative. A problem like water scarcity is at once a scientific, economic, and social question, so no single subject can explain it alone.
How was this article?