The 9th WEEC (World Environmental Education Congress) will be held in Vancouver, Canada, September 9-15, 2017. The title of the Congress is CulturEnvironment: Weaving new connections. The Organizing Committee for the congress is BC’s Institute for Environmental Learning (IEL) in cooperation with the WEEC Permanent Secretariat.

Hosted by SFU, the Institute for Environmental Learning (IEL) is a collaborative of researchers and practitioners committed to high quality environmental and sustainability learning in British Columbia. Our members come from a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, school districts, community groups, non-profit organizations, and provincial and regional governments. Over 1,000 delegates are expected to attend the Congress. The organizing committee in 2017 will embrace different approaches in both the conceptualization and implementation of EE worldwide.

Our theme in 2017 is Culture/Environment. This focuses on the multi-disciplinarity nature of the congress and a developing view that Culture and Environment are inseparable and may even arise from within each other. Such a theme of environmentalism underscores a need to abandon notions that everything is measurable or under human control. The real paradigm of environmental thinking is uncertainty in the ways forward vs. the idea that ‘progress’ is unavoidable. Cultural change is also the necessary condition/requirement to rebuild and reinvent our relation with nature and live sustainably. Therefore, with this call for papers we promote NETWORK/ACTION/COALITION. WEEC 2017 (Vancouver) will be a congress of Cultural and Environmental mobilization.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is March 31st, 2017.

Congress Themes

• Early Childhood Education and EE
• Place-based Education and Local Outdoor Learning
• Architecture and Green Design
• Arts Based Approaches in EE
• Agriculture and Garden-Based Learning
• Global and Cultural Diversity in EE
• Urban Eco-systems
• Environmental Communication (and Uncertainty)
• Indigenous Knowledge and EE
• Ethics Lead Learning and Sustainability
• Social Responsibility and Agency/Activism
• Nature as Teacher / Nature as Researcher
• Global Policy and Environmental Education
• Perspectives, Challenges and Innovation in Research

NOTE: This above list separates what is inseparable and the congress themes need to be considered as interconnected. Wherever possible, abstracts (300 words or less) should aim to create links among the selected strands. Proposals can also be directed towards an teacher/educator or researcher audience (or both) and formats will be announced after review by the Scientific Committee. The submission site is now ready to receive your proposals. To begin go to weec2017.org and click on “submit abstract” under the program menu. You will be prompted to register for the site and submit your abstracts. Pleaser refer to the website http://weec2017.eco-learning.org/call-for-abstracts/.