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What is environment? The answer to this question is fundamental to how we teach environmental studies and sciences (ESS). We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping, a new learning technology. Concept maps potentially offer a visually explicit means of representing and analyzing the hybrid connections between actors that define environmental issues. We explore the utility of concept mapping as pioneered by Joseph Novak and others via the Cmap Tools application, in which concept maps (cmaps) consist of concepts connected by propositions; both can include linked resources, and the resultant cmap can be collaboratively edited and shared online. We evaluate concept mapping in the context of a sophomore-level environmental methods course taught annually at Lewis & Clark College. The course includes adaptations of concept mapping drawing on Novak's work and actor-network theory, designed for students to reflect on their environmental perspectives, synthesize course material, and explore a proposed topic for environmental research. These exercises were evaluated in fall 2010 using self-reports, assessment rubrics, and open-ended student responses. Results showed that higher achieving students generally found concept mapping more demanding and attained more sophisticated understandings of connections. This suggests that concept mapping helps facilitate the intellectual struggle that characterizes engaged learning, yet also that not all students embrace this struggle to fully grasp environment-as-connection. In a larger sense, the study illustrates challenges in cultivating new approaches to environment in the ESS community.

Provides background information on constructivism and explains how this theory can be integrated into geography education. Describes a geography course that employs the constructivist-oriented strategy of team-based collaborative inquiry along with Internet communication tools to foster student cooperation, interaction, and comparative analysis of student-generated research data. Offers an evaluation of the course. (CMK)

Reports on an experiment designed to document the benefits of introducing computer exercises into an introductory human geography course. Suggests that the disappointing results reflect the fact that quantitative evaluation of multimedia effectiveness is ineffective due to the inherent complexity of learning. Recommends combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. (MJP)

Describes a pilot project that implemented and tested an interactive system of multimedia computer learning modules for an introductory human geography course. The project used a sequential learning process moving from initial concepts, to collaborative writing, and on to geographical analyses by the students. Includes assignment examples, system diagrams, and evaluation results. (MJP)

There is still considerable debate about the role of GIS in geography departments. Research indicates that some people regard GIS as a tool, while others see it as having a toolmaking role and still others focus on the science of GIS and are prepared to look at the important issues which are raised by the use of GIS. It can be established that GIS both creates and encounters new areas of science, and these in turn create a range of demands for basic and applied knowledge.

I argue for the centrality of the concepts of biophysical and human nature in science-and-religion studies, consider five different metaphors, or 'visions,' of nature, and explore possibilities and challenges in reconciling them. These visions include (a) evolutionary nature, built on the powerful explanatory framework of evolutionary theory; (b) emergent nature, arising from recent research in complex systems and self-organization; (c) malleable nature, indicating both the recombinant potential of biotechnology and the postmodern challenge to a fixed ontology; (d) nature as sacred, a diffuse popular concept fundamental to cultural analysis; and (e) nature as culture, an admission of epistemological constructivism. These multiple visions suggest the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, in which each man made the classic mistake of part-whole substitution in believing that what he grasped (the tail, for example) represented the elephant as a whole. Indeed, given the inescapability of metaphor, we may have to admit that the ultimate truth about the 'elephant' (nature, or the reality toward which science and religion point) is a mystery, and the best we can hope for is to confess the limitations of any particular vision.