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The root cause of the majority of environmental problems lies not in surface manifestations such as carbon dioxide and ozone, but with social and cultural factors that encourage people to consume far more than they need. Environmental education can be divided into two main kinds: micro approaches, which the majority of current approaches fall under, and macro approaches, which are currently emerging. Micro environmental education considers environmental problems in terms of surface manifestations, and proposes micro-changes such as recycling to address them, without questioning the possibility of a cultural shift away from consumerism. This form of environmental education typically seeks to change the behaviour of social actors by building and appealing to their environmental consciousness in the expectation that they will act rationally. It is argued here that this expectation fails to recognise that social actors are subject to plural rationalities and that their behaviour is driven by complex interrelationships with other social actors. As a result, micro environmental education, despite its best intentions, often fails to adequately address and change the environmentally unsustainable behaviour of the social actors it targets. This thesis firstly aims to uncover why micro approaches to environmental education exist and persist. Primary qualitative research with environmental educators drawn from formal, free-choice and accidental channels of environmental education was conducted and is presented alongside a review of the historical development of environmental education. The second aim of this thesis is to argue against a reliance on micro approaches to environmental education and environmentalism in general and propose instead that environmental education becomes embedded within a wider macro approach. Macro approaches seek to change behaviour through the development of a critical understanding of interrelationships among social actors, leading ultimately to environmentally positive changes in them. Findings from the primary research also help reveal the conditions necessary for macro approaches to emerge from the current environmental education infrastructure. The thesis concludes that macro environmental education is both necessary and possible and calls for further research into its development and practice.

Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is a thriving national sign language used by tens of thousands of signers in Kenya, and which emerged out of two deaf schools in western Kenya in the early 1960s. In this thesis, I provide a thorough description and analysis of the basic phonological components of the KSL lexicon used in the southwestern region of Kenya (formerly south Nyanza Province). This phonological grammar of (SoNy)KSL makes contributions in three domains. In the descriptive domain, it provides a thorough report of the basic units in the main phonological parameters; i.e., Handshape (Ch. 4), Location (Ch. 5), and Movement (Ch 6, 7), as well as the evidence for the distinctiveness of each unit. The description for Movement and Location are particularly noteworthy because those parameters have received less attention in sign linguistics in general compared to Handshape. In the methodological domain, the grammar is based on a KSL Lexical Database built for this project, in which over 50 phonetic characteristics of 1,880 non-compound signs were coded. This database is currently one of only a few such richly coded lexical databases of sign languages. In addition, this grammar employs a rigorous approach to determining lexical contrast, which has yielded a separate dataset of 461 minimal pairs (Ch. 3). This dataset is unique in sign linguistics and reveals patterns of lexical contrast that were not previously known--and which have generated new hypotheses about how lexical contrast may be constrained by degrees of visual similarity. Finally, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution by comparing how different models of sign phonology can account for sign types in KSL. By evaluating the explanatory power of the main theories of sign phonology on the basis of specific descriptive data, this thesis gives unique insights into the theoretical validity of these models. It also proposes modifications in some cases, especially with regard to how the Dependency Model (DPM) can account for the representation of movement features and their relationship to the timing tier. In addition, a new movement feature, [dispersed], is described and its implementation worked out in the DPM. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]