Environmental education, narrative complexity and postmodern science/fiction

Abstract

In this paper science education and environmental education are considered as story‐telling practices and the narrative strategies used by educators in these fields to represent and problematize human transactions with the phenomenal world are critically examined. It is argued that the characteristic discourses of much contemporary science and environmental education rarely encompass the narrative complexities that are needed in order to (i) make problems of human interrelationships with environments intelligible (and, thus, amenable to resolution) and (ii) conceptualize postmodern scientific understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’. It is suggested that these problems and concepts are modelled more appropriately‐and interrogated more critically‐by much literary fiction, especially the complex and complicating textual strategies of postmodern science fiction. I thus argue that critical readings of science fiction texts should be integral to both science and environmental education and that the narrative strategies of postmodern fiction should be incorporated into their story‐telling practices.