Participation and Learning: Perspectives on Education and the Environment, Health and Sustainability

The Research in Participatory Education Network (RIPEN) was initiated by the Research Programme for Environmental and Health Education at the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, in 2003. It embraces a broad spectrum of researchers, scholars, students, and practitioners of participatory education, working in or from Europe, North America, Africa, and Australasia. Given the international scope of the network and the range of interests it now has, as initiators and early participants in the network the editorial team invited RIPEN to discuss what a critical perspective on participatory approaches to education might mean for education and the environment, health and sustainability, and how network members might research and substantiate their claims and ar guments. Following the introductory chapter on the scope of this collection, 19 chapters illustrate the contributors’ responses to that invitation. Our focus on critical perspectives was prompted by earlier work by Majid Rahnema in Wolfgang Sachs’s (1992), Development Dictionary. Critiquing concepts of participation in a volume that set out to stimulate cultural, historical, and anth- pological debate on the key concepts of development, Rahnema (p. 126) wrote: Participation, which is also a form of intervention, is too serious and ambivalent a matter to be taken lightly, or reduced to an amoeba word lacking any precise meaning, or a slogan, or fetish, or for that matter, only an instrument or methodology.

Alan Reid is a Senior Lecturer in Education and member of the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment, University of Bath. He is the editor of Environmental Education Research, and co-ordinates doctoral programmes in research methods in education and management, and teaches on Masters programmes in environmental education, technologies and learning, and qualitative research approaches. His research interests focus on teachers’ thinking and practice in environmental education, and policy-related and philosophical issues in environmental education theory and practice.

Bjarne Bruun Jensen is Professor in the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education and directs the Research Programme on Environmental and Health Education. His research interests are in action-oriented health and environmental education; pupils’ concepts of health, inequality in health and action for health, and children as catalysts of social change. He is member of the editorial board of Environmental Education Research and Health Promotion International, and National Coordinator for the Danish network of health promoting schools. He also works as a consultant for WHO within the fields of Health Education and Health Promoting Schools.

Jutta Nikel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment, at the University of Bath. Her research interests focus on empirical and theoretical research regarding environmental education and education for sustainable development, and teachers’ thinking and practice in these areas. Her recent work for the Royal Academy of Engineering focused on how sustainability issues are integrated into undergraduate engineering education. Her current work examines the contribution of Education for Sustainable Development for improving quality in education in low income countries

Venka Simovska, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Health Education and Health Promotion at the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education, and a member of the Research Programme for Environmental and Health Education. She is an academic coordinator of one of the modules of the Masters programme in health education and health promotion, and she teaches and supervises masters and doctoral students. Venka has extensive experience in research related to school-based projects, including the European Network of Health Promoting Schools. Her research interests revolve around issues relating to health, young people and teaching/learning processes in the area of health education and promotion. In particular, her research focuses on student participation and empowerment in learning.