Extract

In Australia, there has been an expectation that infrastructure associated with sustainability will be used for teaching. In mixed methods post-occupancy evaluations undertaken on selected case study primary schools in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia, staff and students were surveyed about their perspectives of their built environment. The survey was designed so that participants were given the opportunity to express their general views on school infrastructure, and then they were asked specific questions about the sustainability infrastructure and activities present in their school. All schools were observed to have similar sustainability infrastructure, yet staff and students tended not report this in the general questions. In the questions specific to sustainability, students did report knowledge of this infrastructure, as did staff; however, staff did not indicate that infrastructure was a pedagogical tool despite sustainability being a cross curriculum priority. This lack of inclusion in pedagogy suggests that sustainability teaching requires more than passive infrastructure presence. While important, caution should be exercised when asserting that this infrastructure acts as a teaching tool.

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