ABSTRACT
Environmental sustainability education is not just a classroom activity (Calder & Clugston, 2005). Certainly, it is possible to teach, in a formal classroom setting, about the environment, its problems and the techniques needed to study and sustain it. It is also possible to build upon this understanding through the direct involvement of students in field experiences in the outside world (Rickinson, 2001, pp. 265–274; Robson, 2002). However, in general, most formal environmental learning is constrained by the classroom and, in higher education, by the ethos of the academy (Margulis, 1997). This aspires to treat the environment from an objective and external viewpoint (Haigh, 2005). Inevitably, the environment becomes an object of study, something outside the student in the same way that it is outside the classroom (cf. Mitford, 2000, p7). Equally, it becomes something that can be forgotten when the class or course is over, something to be packed away with the second-hand textbooks and completed essays.
