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Mapping Sustainability Initiatives Across a Region: An Innovative Survey Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Margaret Somerville  and
Monica Green
Margaret Somerville*
Affiliation:
Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Monica Green
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education (Gippsland campus), Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Margaret Somerville, Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Email: Margaret.Somerville@uws.edu.au
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Abstract

The project of mapping sustainability initiatives across a region is part of a larger program of research about place and sustainability education for the Anthropocene, the new geological age of human-induced planetary changes (Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen, & Crutzen, 2010). The study investigated the location, nature and type of sustainability initiatives in the Gippsland region of Victoria, Australia. The purpose of the study was to trial the development of a place-based survey questionnaire to map initiatives in education for sustainability across a region in order to understand how they emerge in local places. The data from the survey was interpreted using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. This article focuses on the qualitative thematic analysis across all survey responses and assesses the findings in order to determine the usefulness of the approach. The study found that a regional place-based approach enables a different conceptualisation of the possibilities of a cross-sectoral interconnected system of sustainability education. The nonformal and informal sectors are important sites of innovation and have great potential to enrich the pedagogies of education for sustainability in the formal sector.

Keywords

sustainabilityeducationmappingplace and community
Type
Feature Articles
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , December 2012 , pp. 65 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

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