Eco-Thinking

Eco-Thinking: Highlighting Diversity in Research

2019-06-25T13:27:52-07:00

With the launch of the Eco-thinking journal, the goal is to describe research with/in environmental learning as a diverse and growing field of inquiry, respondent to a variety of international program developments and contexts. This research might be labeled under various genres: environmental education, global education, indigenous education, health education, eco-justice education, education for sustainable development, or environmental learning. However, what truly matters is that there are a broad range of perspectives and paradigms described that will critically inform our work as educators and as researchers. With this editor’s note and the launch of the Eco-thinking journal. It is hoped that this begins to describe a range of possibilities that exist around the varied and expanding contexts for research in environmental learning.

Structures That Teach: Using a Semiotic Framework to Study the Environmental Messages of Learning Settings

2019-06-25T13:27:59-07:00

Everything within the learning setting holds the potential for learning and teaching. A significant, often overlooked source for accessing new information lies in the learner’s knowledge and use of cultural values, habits and norms. In addition to listening and reading texts, learning takes place through daily interaction with building and communication structures. These structures are representations of cultural values that are read by all who inhabit learning settings. They are structures that teach. The messages of these structures remain with students long after they leave learning settings. Like language, knowledge of culture serves as an everyday and ever-ready resource for information about how to gather and share knowledge and ideas about how learning proceeds. This article describes the value of documenting some of the environmental messages of these structures using a semiotic interpretive research approach. Semiotics explores the signs and systems of signification that are used to engage learners. Messages are organized and expanded using four main categories: 1) Architectural Messages; 2) Text and Curriculum Messages; 3) Social/Behavioral Messages and 4) Policy Messages. The study suggests that a semiotic consideration of learning settings allows identification and critique of ineffective environmental messages and suggests the creation of messages that will lead to more effective knowledge, habits and routines.

Environmental Literacy And Sustainability Values: A Content Analysis Of Environmental Education Standards

2019-06-25T13:28:22-07:00

Addressing values may be an important aspect of environmental literacy and eco-centric paradigms. This mixed-methods content analysis compares five state environmental education standards, national environmental education guidelines and the Earth Charter for inclusion of sustainability values. Data were generated through traditional hand-coding, computer text analysis and document profiling through qualitative methods. Triangulation showed state standards and national guidelines adequately address ecological integrity principles, but not environmental justice principles. Although some documents addressed sustainability and reflection on environmental values through issue analysis, documents from the most populous states focused on the science of ecology, excluding terms such as values and sustainability.

Environmental Learning: How BC Teachers Find and Use Resources

2019-06-25T13:28:51-07:00

Environmental educators draw from a variety of sources to guide their practice, from local organizations and venues, to print and online resources. This article examines how teachers find and use resources to inform their teaching practice. It draws from key findings from research exploring the practices of BC teachers and how they used a specific suite of resources that were developed to support the implementation of environmental education (Cirkony, 2012). These resources include the Environmental Learning and Experience (ELE) Interdisciplinary Guide, Curriculum Maps, and Videos. The results demonstrated that most teachers were aware of the ELE resources, with just over half using them. Those who used the resources did so to design lesson plans, apply an interdisciplinary approach to their teaching, and justify their practice. Of the three resources, teachers found the Interdisciplinary Guide the most helpful to their teaching practice. The findings are of interest to those who are looking to implement environmental learning in their teaching practice, or to develop related resources and professional development for teachers.

Finding Our Way Home: An Ecological Sense of Self and Honouring the Places We Are From

2019-06-25T13:29:29-07:00

This article explores the role of the pedagogy of place, specifically places where we feel at home and how they have acted pedagogically upon us. It also examines the role of the pedagogy of the imagination and how we locate ourselves within cultures and worldviews. Indigenous people understand the environmental ecology and the cultural ecology of a place as a living animated wholeness. Indigenous people and their lands are an interwoven whole. This living wholeness as well as the individual parts are struggling for survival. As an Indigenous scholar, artist, educator I have tracked my lived experiences within this integration of the biosphere with the ethnosphere and witnessed how they have created a specific sensibility, view of the world, and perspective on environmental education. This article describes how these experiences became the foundation for the creation of an Indigenous pedagogical approach to environmental education and eventually informed a course for in-service educators. The final section of the article outline this pedagogical approach as well as its resulting curriculum and concludes with a vision of the implications for such an Indigenous arts-based process in environmental teacher education.

Pedagogy for Education on Sustainability: Integrating Digital Technologies and Learning Experiences Outside School

2019-06-25T13:30:00-07:00

This paper reports on an inquiry into designing effective pedagogy to enhance students understanding on environmental education and its importance. This inquiry sought to provide insights on how to better plan for Learning Experiences Outside School (LEOS) and ways of integrating out of school activities with classroom practices using digital technologies, namely Moodle. This included identifying perceptions of students, teachers and Informal Science Institute (ISI) staff, of these experiences using semi-structured interviews, before, during and after the visit and assessing students’ learning experiences. This naturalistic study was conducted in a rural private religious school in New Zealand and comprised two phases. In the first phase, 102 Year 10 (14-year-old) students and 10 teachers visited an Informal Science Institution (ISI), a pest-controlled native forest called Island Ecological Reserve on the second last day of the year. It appears that LEOS was seen as a reward, instead of an informal learning experience where students could construct knowledge through social negotiations. The second phase occurred the following year, and 65 from the same cohort of students now in Year 11 (15-year-olds), visited the same ISI, to learn about why protecting New Zealand’s biodiversity is an issue, The important biological ideas about biodiversity, and differing viewpoints that people have about biodiversity. In this phase, there was emphasis placed on pre- and post-visit planning using a digitally integrating learning model. Data comprised photographs, field notes, unobtrusive observations of the classroom, student work books and teacher planning diaries. Student assessment results showed a significant increase in performance in achievement.

Environment: Re-negotiating the E in STEM Education

2019-06-25T13:30:47-07:00

There is little debate that protecting eco-systems and sustaining the environment is important, critical even, now and in the future. From an educational perspective, there is an imperative to provide authentic, ecology-based learning experience for all students. In the Australian Curriculum, Environmental Sustainability is a cross-curricula priority. More specifically, there are also outcomes in the Australian Curriculum Science in the sub-strands, Science as a Human Endeavour and Science Understanding (Biological sciences) that focus on the environment: caretaking, respect, and an awareness of the complex connectedness of biotic and abiotic factors. Seemingly Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has concurrently risen as the new panacea to address economic and employment issues globally. This paper posits that STEM education could be re-imagined by addressing the E as “eco-thinking”, and that this could provide a more cogent and inclusive approach to addressing environmental issues. Integrated and authentic STEM education could not only provide a space to investigate environmental issues but also offer a frame to image and implement solutions or resolutions. In this paper we explore this notion and consider how STEM education could look as ST(Environment)M in elementary schools, either within classrooms or elsewhere in the school.

A US Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Program (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development

2019-06-25T13:31:12-07:00

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) allows every human being to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values necessary to shape a sustainable future. During the United Nations Decade of ESD (2005-2014), a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the US expanded sustainability efforts across schools, higher education institutions, non-profits, government agencies, industries, and faith communities. In November 2014, UNESCO launched the Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (GAP) at the World Conference in Japan, to extend ESD efforts. In response, the U.S. delegation of American non-governmental organizations, led by the Greater Portland Sustainability Education Network (GPSEN) - a UN University Regional Centre of Expertise (RCE) on ESD and other key stakeholders, developed a series of recommendations to increase education, public awareness, and training efforts in the US to foster a more sustainable future. With the launch of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, countries have agreed to establish objectives to meet the 17 SDGs. ESD includes key issues through participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behavior and take action, consequently promoting competencies like critical thinking, collaborative decision-making, and innovative problem-solving. The following ESD Roadmap and Implementation Recommendations seeks to engage all stakeholders to advance the GAP’s priority action areas in the US by advancing policies, transforming institutions, building capacity, empowering and engaging youth, and strengthening local communities.

The Influence of a “Natural Exploration” Approach in Developing Environmental Attitudes and Understanding of 3R Principles for Primary School Students

2019-06-25T13:31:33-07:00

This paper describes the impact of a natural exploration approach in thematic learning to develop environmental attitudes and deeper understanding of the 3R principles (Reduce/Reuse/Recycle) in elementary school students. This research involved a single group (pretest-posttest) of fourth grade students from a public elementary school in Indonesia during the year 2014/2015. Participants were recruited randomly in a class that numbered 36 students. The pedagogical approach used to implement thematic learning with a natural exploration approach were: (1) exploration activities, involving exploration and observation in the local school environment; (2) elaboration activities, where students worked in groups to make predictions about the rubbish problem in their school environment and to propose alternative solutions; (3) confirmation activities, where students in groups communicated their group’s results in a collage exhibition; and (4) assessment activities, using performance capabilities and measuring the students’ environmental attitudes and their understanding of the 3R principles. The research instruments used were: (1) an observation sheet; (2) interviews; and (3) a questionnaire. Data analysis was performed using a dependent t-test. The research demonstrates that a “natural exploration” thematic learning approach can be very effective in improving the environmental attitudes and understandings of 3R principles in fourth grade primary school students.

Acts of Reading and Gathering in Place: Our Stories so Far…

2019-06-25T13:31:41-07:00

This article maps the ongoing journey of our reading group’s investigation of outdoor and environmental learning and early childhood education as a form of conceptual and practical activism. The journey is presented as three ‘streams’ exemplifying the fluid, non-linear ways in which the reading group and our ideas appeared. Place, Environmental Education, and Activism are currents guiding our emerging understandings of the relations between activism, stories, local and global communities, and the importance of education happening outdoors. Our monthly gatherings act as confluences of these topics via readings of local and international papers, and contributions from our members, a diverse set of local and international academics, students, teachers and community organizations. We offer a glimpse into our learning, our dynamic journey, and our discoveries. We invite readers to enter these conversational streams, and to consider how a local outdoor reading group might become a form of activism in their own international contexts.

Sustainability Policies if Necessary but Not Necessarily Sustainability Policies

2019-06-25T13:32:08-07:00

The paper examines the appropriateness and limitations of campus sustainability policies as a tool for advancing campus sustainability. It begins by exploring the case of a mid-sized university in the prairie region of Canada, the University of Regina, along with the co-evolution of the Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development in Saskatchewan (RCE Saskatchewan), of which the University of Regina is a founding partner. It highlights the challenges implementing sustainability policies in both contexts yet, despite this absence of policy, the respective advances in campus sustainability initiatives through each. To account for this seeming paradox, the paper explores how, while on the surface, sustainability policies might be viewed as central to advancing specific social and political sustainability objectives within an organization along with greater efficiency and effectiveness in resource allocation towards sustainability goals, the nature of policy within an increasingly corporatized university structure and professionalized sustainability management system may potentially impede these objectives. The paper concludes by highlighting the value of a decentralized approach that respects and integrates the traditional scholarly accountability of universities that promote academic freedom along with a current need to create sustainable scholarly livelihoods that advance this freedom in an increasingly restrictive organizational environment.

A Developmental Framework For Adolescent Leaders For Sustainability

2019-06-25T13:32:24-07:00

Adult leadership has been a research focus for some time and, more recently, some researchers have turned their attention to adult leadership as it relates to sustainability. However, there has been far less research in the field of child and adolescent leadership, with only a few researchers addressing adolescent leadership for sustainability. In addition, while there are a number of development frameworks for adult leaders, there are none in the field of adolescent leadership for sustainability. This paper helps to address the gap in the knowledge base in this field and, in particular, proposes a framework with five different levels of adolescent leadership for sustainability, as well as strategies to help motivate adolescents to progress through these different levels of leadership. This framework will have practical implications for educators and teachers who are developing and conducting education programs with adolescent leaders by providing a number of unique instruments and tools.

Social representations of climate change in a group of college students from the University of Santiago de Compostela: common culture vs. scientific culture

2019-06-25T13:32:43-07:00

College students are a sector of the population that is called to play a fundamental role in the future societies. This responsibility with and for society cannot obviate humanity's main challenge nowadays, the anthropogenic climate change. To this end, it is necessary to understand the climatic problem in all its dimensions, in order to propose and accept strategies and measures of adaptation and mitigation. In this paper we present a research on college students of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (N = 644). A closedend questionnaire was used to explore college students´ climate literacy level. Outcomes were compared according to academic discipline and year course. There were statistically significant differences in the distributions of responses (ANOVA) between areas of knowledge and of university degree fields. Nevertheless, in the case of comparing 1st year students with 4th year students there is not statistical significance. Outcomes suggest that most of the information with which college students build their representation of climate change comes from their stage in secondary education and experiences out of the educational system.

Promoting Arts Based Environmental Education for Primary School Pupils in Guyana

2019-06-25T13:33:07-07:00

This paper presents a Case Study that adopts a mixed method approach that utilizes a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews that have targeted students and teachers respectively, to assess the status of Arts based environmental education in primary schools in Guyana. The study reveals that Arts-based EE is limited in the current primary school system in Guyana. Moreover, it is confined to Grades 1, 2 and 3 where it is integrated in Drawing, Decorative Craft, Imaginative Composition, Fibre Arts, and Drawing in the Visual Arts options. Importantly, there are no guidelines for implementation; as such the teachers are the sole decision makers in this regard. Consequently, there is no uniformity in approach, and this situation is further exacerbated by the constraint of time, trained teachers, appropriate teaching and learning materials, parents’ perception of the Arts, among others. The paper posits, among other things, that teachers must first understand and appreciate the fact that art-based education fosters environmental learning; hence the need for urgent review of the curriculum of Teachers Training Institutions to ensure that Arts-based EE is integrated in its training programme. Additionally, a series of workshops must be designed for teachers who have already completed the Teachers Training Programme.