ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why was a Virtual Special Issue developed from the Journal of Curriculum Studies on environmental education. Even a cursory scan of leading publications on teaching and learning would suggest a veritable silence towards environmental education and its questions. A recurring theme across these sections is how to develop scholarship on specific ‘barriers and enablers’ to embedding and developing particular forms of education, most typically if environmental education is taken to be part of a broad and difficult family of ‘adjectival educations’. The question of margins and mainstream is also sharply realised when people consider what gets assessed and reported on in schools, especially in relation to environmental and sustainability matters. The reliance on external programs is a concern , as is why environmental education no longer seems to have the profile that it entertained before the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, and whether the two are related.
