ABSTRACT
As I (re)read Jensen and Schnack’s ‘Action competence approach in environmental education’ and Payne’s ‘The technics of environmental education’ I was reminded of a Thanksgiving Dinner a few years ago, where I sat next to the mother of the chair of my department. Then in her mid 90s and still very alert, in her younger days, she had been a teacher in New York City and a civil rights activist. Her concern was that ‘people are not taking action these days, not like we used to’. By ‘action’, she meant hitting the streets, protesting, getting in people’s faces. I pondered this statement for a moment and then responded, perhaps a little defensively, ‘I think they are taking action. It’s just that the medium, forms and forum for action have changed. I think a lot of action is organized and taken via the Internet’. She looked at me, and while she didn’t say it, I think she wanted to say ‘but it’s just not the same’. Her point of course was that in her mind, an ‘action’ such as a civil rights protest had to be conspicuous, ‘visible’ and on the street, as opposed to being ‘invisible’, on the Internet. Perhaps she felt that mediated action through the Internet is somehow less valuable than what she perceived to be the non-mediated, visible action of her youth.
