Adjunct Professor Keith Skamp - ACT's first AAEE Fellow

By Vivienne Pearce OAM

The AAEE Fellowship is to recognise a member who has made an outstanding contribution to environmental education at a national and international level over their career. Local member, Keith Skamp has certainly done that over the years as detailed below. At the 2021 AAEE Conference in WA, Keith was awarded the AAEE Fellowship. Here in the ACT we count ourselves lucky to have such a talented and distinguished person as an active member in our Chapter.  Since joining the ACT he has been actively mentoring and supporting our local ACT educators. Whether it be as a panel member for our awards, helping with submissions and advocacy to local government, sparking ideas around curriculum or other issues in ACT members, Keith is our local treasure. It is wonderful to have his lifetime of work in environmental education acknowledged by AAEE.

Keith is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Education at Southern Cross University in northern NSW. He has held visiting scholar and professorial positions at several universities in England and North America. His research and teaching areas are science education, environmental education, and research methodology. He has been an AAEE member for several decades. He moved to Canberra and has been involved with the ACT chapter for about 5 years, assisting with various submissions, meetings, and publications (including a soon to be published paper with Jodie Green on Earth System Science Education). His personal involvement with environmental issues dates to the late 60s when he heard Paul Ehrlich speak in Sydney about his book The Population Bomb. It influenced many of his later decisions. 

Keith introduced Environmental Education (later to embrace ‘Education/Learning for Sustainability’) as a subject in preservice Teacher Education degrees (and later other degrees) in the mid-80s. This was the only EE subject offered at Southern Cross University until 2011 (Keith continued teaching after his retirement in 2009). Keith’s contributions to teaching and learning were recognised when he received the Southern Cross University Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement (Teaching and Learning) as well as the Australian Science Teachers’ Association’s Distinguished Service Award. Both awards were based, in part, on contributions to teaching and learning in EE.

Keith’s major EE research grants and outcomes have related to the impact of Learnscapes on school teaching and learning and school students’ willingness to take actions to reduce global warming based on their beliefs about such actions. The latter area is an ongoing international investigation with several very recent publications. These and other EE areas have been the focus of publications for over 35 years up to and including the present time; they include 20 refereed journal articles, two book chapters (one overviewing EE in Australia in 2009) and EE/Sustainability Education contributions to the most highly recommended (primary) science education text in Australian universities. Keith is the main editor and writer (Teaching primary science constructively [7^th edition, 2021]). He has shared his EE research and scholarly contributions through papers at 19 international conferences as well as invited international lectures and seminars at various universities in Canada and the USA, the UK and Tanzania. Similar presentations have occurred at state and regional levels.

Some major funded EE consultancies that Keith has completed (several within the last decade) include the external evaluation of a University’s Sustainability Education contribution to its various degrees, a comprehensive world-wide research and best practice review on EfS for the then NSW Department of Education and Training and an international review of Air Quality Education for the Australian Government Department of Environment and Heritage.

Keith’s other contributions to EE over the years have included an ongoing role as an external examiner of doctoral theses, continuing in the role – for more than a decade - as a member of the International Board of Advisory Editors of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education as well as an occasional reviewer for other international EE journals and attracting EE scholars to Southern Cross University.

Congratulations Keith!