A comprehensive approach to effective environmental education

Introduction
Environmental Education (EE) is a broad concept that addresses a range of methodological, thematic, and audience issues. Over the past three decades, environmental educators have sought to provide distinctive goals, definitions, standards, and guidelines to help educators and facilitators understand how to differentiate environmental education from other educational practices and how to make it effective.
Environmental education is a very important discipline for achieving sustainable development (SD), because it as been identified as the prerequisite for any effective and long-term action is to explain the principles, frameworks and principles to achieve sustainable development. One of the obstacles to the successful implemention of Sustainable Development Plan and achieving maximum effectiveness results is scattered, simple and incorrect perceptions of the concept of environmental education, its function and dimensions among people. Chapter Thirty-six of Agenda Twenty-One (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) introduces public participation as the introduction to sustainable development and public education as the introduction to participation. This transnational international document emphasizes that content must include environmental education and sustainable development.
Many paragraphs of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development statement (Rio de Janeiro 2012) repeatedly emphasize that people are at the center of sustainable development and that member states must commit to providing environmental education in order to achieve the goals of sustainable development. These trainings are vital because they promote the development of social capital and environmental insight, and expose people to a social transformation approach with their rights and responsibilities, and move from unsustainable one-dimensional economic development to far-reaching sustainable development.
Despite the fact that books, articles, national and international transcendental documents in the field of environmental education are now available, a comprehensive definition of this concept to cover all theoretical and scientific aspects, and a theory or conceptual model that determines features, strategies, executive arms and results is not available. This study aimed to fill this gap and provide a comprehensive approach to the field of effective environmental education.

Materials and methods
The present research has been done by documentary method with an explanatory-analytical approach. In this regard, the analysis of national and international documents, articles and books in the field of environmental education continued to the point of theoretical saturation. The findings of this study led to the presentation of clear theoretical and practical definitions of effective environmental education, and the presentation of the conceptual model of "effective environmental education". In this conceptual scheme, an attempt was made to integrate facts, descriptions, analyzes, and interpretations, and to clarify existing criticisms, characteristics, strategies, executive arms, and results of effective environmental education. Finally, suggestions were provided based on the findings.

Conclusion
Many experts believe that the best way to strengthen the values of the environment in society is to provide environmental education. In this regard, the present article has been done with the aim of creating a discourse and in response to the question of what is effective environmental education. Because education has a social and moral commitment, learning environmental teachings, provided they are applied and problem-oriented, leads to individual activism and a sense of responsibility and intergenerational commitment. Without striving for quality and efficient education to institutionalize ethical principles, achieving sustainable development will also be impossible.
The results of this study are in line with the results of the World Conference "Science for the 21st Century, a New Commitment", which comprehensively examined the future orientation of science and education in communities and people's expectations. Therefore, effective education equipped with moral restraints or in other words "ethical education" is recommended.
The results of this study indicated that in the theoretical dimension, effective environmental education could be defind an intertwined set of perceptions, interpretations and analyzes related to the process of transmitting insights, attitudes and active actions . In the executive dimension, effective environmental education includes categories such as macro planning by policy makers and officials, production of content and application of knowledge received by learners at different levels of society. Effective education can be policy-making, teaching and guidance, as well as conducting research.
The authors of this study, along with Mehr Mohammadi (2013), who cites a problem called Hyperfactualism, as quoted by David Easton, argue that no organization wants a cluttered mass of information and an over-indulgence in facts unless in the form of an intellectual framework that enables people to study or ask better questions and interpret observations. In this regard, in the field of research in effective environmental education and to avoid the problem of hyper-realism, efforts were made to consolidate facts, descriptions, analyzes, interpretations and criticisms in the form of a comprehensive conceptual model, so that the characteristics, strategies, executive arms and the resuls of environmental education become more transparent.
As shown in the conceptual model, effective environmental education has five characteristics, nine strategies and five executive arms; the interaction of all these cases will deliver effective environmental education. The result of effective environmental education is also shown in the development of learners' ecological identity, increasing social capital, educating ecological citizens and creating a platform for citizen participation in social management. Finally, due to the vastness of the field of environmental education research and the lack of research to theorize and provide conceptual models in this field, researchers and experts are advised to focus on each of the dimensions of effective environmental education in future research.
Finally, recommendations were provided to all involved groups. For example, it is recommended to policy makers in scientific institutions to allocate parts of their expertise and budget to research projects that specifically focus on the basic principles of environmental education and research that seeks to increase the effectiveness of this process to achieve sustainability in quantitative and qualitative methods. Environmental facilitators in environmental education centers such as nature schools are advised to try to give learners the power of analysis by conveying a general and inferential view, so that they can make the right decisions in accordance with the principles of sustainability in various situations. Educators in all public and private institutions, organizations and agencies that are responsible for the serious task of environmental education are recommended to benefit from the experiences of others while sharing their experiences presenting articles, lectures and other formats.