Ngano: Teaching Environmental Education Using the Shona Folktale (Report‪)‬

Introduction Most people have a misconception about the environment. They think that the term 'environment' only applies to the nature 'around us'. In this limited view of the environment, they understand it as meaning plants, animals, mountains, etc. In Guidelines for Secondary Teacher Training: Environmental Education in Zimbabwe, the authors have corrected the misconception by pointing out that the concept environment has undergone some redefinition. It now includes social, economic and political components in addition to the traditional biophysical one (2004:1). This view of the environment emerged in the 1970s. Earlier on, the concept environment was mainly used to refer to nature or the biophysical elements of our surroundings. People appeared to be mainly concerned about impacts on nature, plants water and animals (O'Donoghue 1995 in Rhodes University Certificate/Goldfields in Environmental Education: Theme 2 Handout). The first guiding principle for effective environmental education also stresses the multifaceted nature of the environment when they assert that environmental education should, "consider the environment in its totality--natural and built, technological and social (economic, political, cultural--historical, moral, aesthetic)" (Tbilisi Principles Russia 1977). Thus, all the four major aspects of the environment are intertwined, an action that may appear to be political may have an impact on both the social, economic and biophysical environment. For example, the Rhodesian land tenure system (Johnson 2000:124) wherein Blacks were crammed in the over-populated rural areas, this led to over cultivation of the land, and to erosion since most people ended up cutting trees to clear the little space that was available for agriculture, and at the end, there was poverty, an economic consequence of a political decision that was taken for economic reasons--to cushion White Rhodesians. Therefore, some Africans the only way to survive was to become thieves if they were male or prostitutes if they were female, although all these means of survival are frowned upon socially.