Popular environmental education : progressive contextualization of local practice in a globalizing world

The thesis examines the popular environmental education practice of the Center for Environmental Concerns – Philippines (CEC) and distils insights into educational practice in a globalizing world. Progressive contextualization is used to examine the development of CEC’s educational practice. It is a human ecology research method developed by Andrew Vayda that studies people and environment interactions within progressively denser or wider contexts. In the context of educational practice, CEC described it as a process of adjusting the module to the local context. The research observed educational tensions between the context of the local and the global, the emphasis of content on the biophysical and political, and the methodology as participatory and prescriptive. The thesis identified time, space, and the context of the learners as the key local factors of progressive contextualization. An action research approach and an emphasis on participation were identified as the key organizational and educational processes. The main organizational structures that contributed to these processes were the People's Faculty and the progressive people's movement in the Philippines. The research observed that although progressive contextualization initially involved the localization of the education module, it was equally an organizational development process for CEC and the organizations it worked with. Examination of CEC's approaches to linking the local to national context indicated a development from an ecological, geographic and holistic approach to a mode of production analysis. However, these same frameworks were not applied in dealing with the global context, which emphasized scale and space, rather than holistic relationships. The thesis proposes a description of progressive contextualization in relation to popular environmental education as an on-going and reciprocal process of educational and organizational development that begins from the local context. It establishes local-global links that are not limited to space and scale and values the intermediary role of non-governmental organizations and the networks of local efforts and organizations as part of this process.