The Culture of Environmental Education: Insights from a Citizen Science Experiment in India

The impact of culture on environmental education is well acknowledged by theorists and practitioners in the field; however, the particular mechanisms by which cultural factors may influence environmental educational practices are still relatively unexplored. In this note we describe a citizen science initiative that we attempted to implement in a rural area in southern India, and draw on our experiences with the project to show how cultural beliefs regarding the purpose of school education and the importance of environmental issues can interact in subtle ways to present challenging scenarios to environmental educators.