This paper attempts to illustrate the influence of an emerging New Public Health on the relationship between health education and environmental education. This New Public Health places health on the political agenda. In so doing it involves a critical examination of the underlying and pervasive ideology of individualism which is so embedded within conventional health education. Health education tends to focus on individual behavioural factors for health and ignores the wider environmental, social, economic and political factors. However, a new consciousness within health education serves to critique the existing relationship between individualism and health and is essentially concerned with examining the broader influences on health.

The paper concludes optimistically by suggesting that this new consciousness encapsulating the notion of an Emancipatory Health Education in schools has the potential for encouraging emancipatory social change involving a recognition of the social and environmental constraints on health. Because of this there needs to be a rethink and a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between school health education and environmental education.

This paper focuses on teacher education in environmental education. In seeking alternatives and improvements in EE teacher education, it is instructive to see what lessons might be learnt from efforts at distance education in this field. The paper will outline the structure and context of a teacher education course in environmental education -- a course that is part of an off-campus (distance education) Bachelor of Education program -- and then consider a number of curriculum issues that have arisen in the history of this course.

The course itself is located in a Bachelor of Education program at Deakin University and is available for practising teachers throughout Australia who are interested in upgrading their education qualifications without having to travel physically to the host institution offering the degree. The B.Ed, program comprises a number of ‘generic’ curriculum courses in such areas as curriculum design and development, educational enquiry and action research, and a number of ‘specialist’ curriculum courses in such areas as mathematics education, language education and art and music education. The environmental education course takes its place among the ‘specialist’ curriculum courses.

In most Victorian schools outdoor education has meant the weekend bushwalk or the end of year camp. It has been extra-curricula. But that is changing.

Outdoor education appears poised to achieve subject status is Victoria. It is included in official curriculum developments and is served by recognised specialist tertiary courses.

Outdoor education has been distinguished from physical education by its focus on environmental education, and a converse argument probably applies. But is the environmental education which occurs in outdoor education distinguished by anything other than an association with adventure activities? After all, field trips are not a new idea.

This paper argues that the distinctiveness of outdoor education as a form of environmental education is derived from its physical and conceptual isolation from schooling. Conceptual isolation provides the opportunity to construct powerfully affective forms of de-schooled environmental education.

The ways in which an outdoor education context can provide different situational constraints from those existing in schools or other institutions are outlined. An action research project is used to exemplify ways in which teachers might reconceive education within those new constraints.

The paper concludes that outdoor education can allow powerful forms of environmental education to develop, but that a technocratic rationalisation of the field associated with its increasing institutionalisation threatens to negate that potential.

The undergraduate degree in Environmental Science at Murdoch University has been a 14 year experiment in providing a new kind of disciplinary training and profession. Some achievements are examined and possible directions for the future reviewed.

This paper is about an experiment in environmental education in Western Australia - the establishment of an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science. The experiment has hardly been discussed before, mainly because the experiment was still going on, but 1989 represents a new phase of that experiment after the retirement of the Foundation Professor Des O'Connor. Some perspective is thus attempted on its achievements and possible directions for the future are examined.

It has been an important experiment because there are very few places in Australia or overseas where there has been such a commitment and vision to seeking solutions to environmental problems through education. This is mainly because there are not many places where a new University has been founded in the past 15 years with Environmental Science as a foundation discipline.