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Beyond Constructivism: A Goethean Approach to Environmental Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Nigel Hoffmann
Nigel Hoffmann*
Affiliation:
Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney - Hawkesbury
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Extract

Environmental education is only at a developmental stage, having originated in response to the environmental problems which have been most pressingly felt in the last thirty years or so. There is a general concern that we do not unconsciously carry into our new philosophies and methodologies the very dysfunctions which led to our environmental problems in the first place. Consequently there has been a search for paradigms of knowledge and enquiry which are adequate for the new problems that we face, paradigms which recognise the essential interrelatedness of all forms of life and the fact that enquirers are themselves part of environments, not just external observers as it is considered in classical rationalist science. The philosophy and method of critical evaluation which goes by the name ‘constructivism’ declares itself to be a way which can lead us beyond the mistakes of earlier theories of knowledge. I will be contending that, rather than being a way beyond rationalism and positivism, the constructivist approach is entirely bound up with that which it seeks to criticise, even if it assumes a radical posture. Out of this critique of constructivism and by way of the ideas of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and the scientific methods of the poet and ‘nature-philosopher’ Johann von Goethe, I will adumbrate an approach to a new form of environmental education which I believe can satisfy our concern that the problems of the past are not perpetuated in a new guise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 10 , 1994 , pp. 71 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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