Practising Place and Learning to Love the World': An Exploration of Place, Knowledge and Practice in Environmental Education

Three primary schools, located in inland south-eastern Australia and practicing broadly defined place-based environmental education, each formed a case-study through which an investigation of environmental education practices utilised by school and community place were explored. The accounts of place-making and place-identity coming from the observations and interview discussions from the case-studies are accounts of action; of people performing and making meaning about the environment through the places they inhabit, and in ways that attempt to understand the world and our relationships in it. Although environmental education has come from a tradition of natural resource management, disciplinary science and biology, conservation and environmental activism, the experiences of the participants in the case schools have formed the basis for exploring a valuing of knowledge constituted through experience and embodied being in place, alongside more discipline-based knowledge. The resulting parallels made to environmental education practice more generally work to show the relational and interconnected nature of understandings of place, knowledge and practice.The philosophical-empirical inquiry of this research has looked to investigating questions of how we can understand place for environmental education learning, the ways in which place and environment constitute knowledge in primary schooling, and the practices and habits of environmental education being carried out through primary school places and practices.