Using theory of learning and awareness to bring about learning through a school-based environmental field project

Abstract

A school-based environmental field project 'What Happens Around You and Your School Area?' was designed under the School-based Curriculum Project Scheme (2001-2002) supported by the Hong Kong Education Manpower Bureau (formerly the Education Department). This school-based environmental field project, with heavy inclusion of environmental elements, was designed in the form of issue-based field inquiry based on student-centred learning to encourage subsequent meaningful learning activities such as group discussion, role-playing exercises and photograph exhibition in class. The field project possesses distinctive geographical and environmental characteristics of the school surrounding environments to bring about meaningful learning among students who study in a local standard new town secondary school in Hong Kong. This paper aims to share this field project experience of designing meaningful issue-based field inquiry using the theory of learning and awareness (Marton & Booth, 1997) to open up the space of learning for students (Marton et al., 2004; Runesson & Marton, 2002). Also based on the framework of educational and environmental ideologies (Fien, 1993), the intended learning outcomes of the field project are to empower students to become active small environmentalists (Kwan, 1995) who are well prepared in terms of geographical and environmental knowledge, skills and values. © 2004 T. Kwan & E. Chan.