Search

Individuals increasingly rely on digital media technologies to learn about and access new information. Yet, despite the dramatic rise in electronic media use among youth and adults, our understanding of its impact, opportunities, and challenges within environmental education remains limited, especially in home contexts. Using a learning ecology framework, we conducted a two-week diary study with 58 diverse adult caretakers, asking them to engage in environmental learning moments with their children. Drawing on qualitative reports of those moments, we found that families relied heavily on digital technologies to support their child's environmental learning, frequently to supplement other activities or spark rich discussions. Findings illustrate how the digitalization of environmental education can extend beyond passive screen time. Overall, this study reveals the critical role of family conversations and shared digital technologies in supporting environmental learning.

Civic engagement is recognized as a critical process to address environmental and other societal issues. To examine the intersection between environmental education and civic engagement, as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, we undertook a systematic mixed studies review to identify environmental education program outcomes related to civic engagement. The environmental education programs included in the final sample (n = 56) occurred in a range of settings, involved diverse audiences, and were generally longer than a month in duration. All 56 studies reported some level of positive findings, with 19 reporting civic-related outcomes at the community level, such as community learning, community resilience, partnership building, and increased social capital. Fifty studies reported civic-related outcomes at the individual level, with civic attitudes being the most frequent. Increased civic skills and civic knowledge were also commonly reported. Analysis revealed five themes related to environmental education practices and implementation that appear to support development of civic engagement: (1) focusing on the local community; (2) actively engaging learners through participatory and experiential approaches; (3) including action-taking as an integral part of the education program; (4) emphasizing development of lifelong cognitive skills; and (5) providing ongoing opportunities for participants to engage in meaningful social interaction.

BackgroundSince Aedes aegypti mosquitoes preferentially breed in domestic containers, control efforts focus on larval source reduction. Our objectives were to design and test the effectiveness of a source reduction intervention to improve caregiver knowledge and behaviors in coastal Kenya.Methodology/principal findingsWe conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial with 261 households from 5 control villages and 259 households from 5 intervention villages. From each household, one child (10-16 years old) and his or her primary caregiver participated in the intervention. We assessed caregiver knowledge and behavior at baseline, as well as 3 and 12 months after the intervention. We assessed household entomological indices at baseline and 12 months after the intervention to avoid seasonal interference. We conducted qualitative interviews with 34 caregivers to understand barriers and facilitators to change. We counted and weighed containers collected by children and parents during a community container clean-up and recycling event. After 12 months, caregiver knowledge about and self-reported behavior related to at least one source reduction technique was more than 50 percentage points higher in the intervention compared to control arm (adjusted risk differences for knowledge: 0.69, 95% CI [0.56 to 0.82], and behavior: 0.58 [0.43 to 0.73]). Respondents stated that other family members' actions were the primary barriers to proper container management. The number of containers at households did not differ significantly across arms even though children and parents collected 17,200 containers (1 ton of plastics) which were used to planted 4,000 native trees as part of the community event.Conclusions/significanceOur study demonstrates that source reduction interventions can be effective if designed with an understanding of the social and entomological context. Further, source reduction is not an individual issue, but rather a social/communal issue, requiring the participation of other household and community members to be sustained.

Environmental education research often emphasizes the importance of community context, but conceptualization and measurement of environmental literacy has mostly occurred at the individual level, often focusing on individual behaviors. The environmental problems facing the world today require collective action--communities coming together to address large-scale problems. Accordingly, understanding and encouraging collective action requires a shift in focus from individual to community-level environmental literacy (CLEL). Despite its importance, CLEL has been left largely undefined and unmentioned in environmental education literature. To understand the field's current conceptualizations and measurement strategies around CLEL, the authors held a convening of 24 researchers to discuss the topic. Here, we report the findings of this convening and present a series of tensions that emerged in conceptualizing and measuring CLEL. We see this area of research as rich with opportunity for innovation and offer considerations for researchers engaging in this work.

Researchers, stakeholders and funding organizations have embraced co-production of knowledge to solve sustainability problems. Research focusing on the practice of co-production can help us understand what works in what contexts and how to avoid potentially undesirable outcomes.

Environmental learning is a lifelong, lifewide, and life-deep endeavor, much of which occurs in the spaces in between those that are studied, remarked upon, and documented. Within this everyday-life context, we examine the concept of learningscapes--intersecting sociocultural, intellectual landscapes where people learn about and undertake practices related to the environment understood as a holistic concept. Considering the affordances and constraints of the environment situated within this everyday-life context, we examine theoretical underpinnings and implications of making daily-life learning visible, while avoiding a doom-and-gloom approach to environmental practices. We end by highlighting research and practice opportunities within environmental learning, overall.

Three decades have passed since approximately 1,700 scientists signed the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" highlighting severe environmental problems and trends affecting local and global communities. To reverse the situation, their 1992 Warning argued we need to change our behaviour. In 2017, a larger group issued a second consensus statement warning that the direction and rates of environmental change had worsened and remained unsustainable. Neither document, however, identified "education" as a key strategy in supporting the necessary behavioural changes that could address such trends. With this in mind, in this essay we argue that to avoid imperilling our future and the planet's--and to achieve a just transition to sustainability--environmental education is a cornerstone for the social and environmental changes expected in such "Warnings." We also argue that consensus on our environmental predicaments is not simply a matter for scientists; it must be supported in multiple spheres. This includes the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and wider society. Only then will contemporary calls by organisations such as UNEP and UNESCO that 'environmental education be a core component of all education systems at all levels by 2025', have a chance of gaining the multilateral and multileveled support the situation so urgently requires.

Environmental learning occurs through an interconnected web of opportunities. Some arise via organizations with sustainability- or environmental learning-focused missions, while others are facilitated by organizations focused on impacts and outcomes in a range of areas, such as health, social justice, or the arts. To better understand the richness of the community environmental learning landscape, we pursued a social network analysis in one place, the greater San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from 256 organizations, resulting in a network of 950 organizations connected to environmental learning opportunities within the region. Our findings demonstrate that, although self-identified environmental learning providers may comprise the network's core, the network also includes less-expected providers, primarily around the edges. Those providers often connect with related fields, such as youth development, public safety, or the arts, among others, forming a complex environmental learning landscape. We suggest opportunities to daylight and enhance the efficacy of collaborations among organizations to advance diverse and reinforcing interests. Moreover, we suggest that a network analysis approach is useful for understanding how organizations relate to each other through their connections and collaborations, providing community members with a robust ecosystem of lifelong learning supports.

There has been growing interest among scholars regarding the role of the built environment on occupant wellbeing. Across five studies conducted online from January 2018 to July 2021, we investigate the impact of design interventions (materials, light, and decor representing diverse identities) on several constructs indicative of wellbeing (sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and environmental efficacy), using self-reported metrics. We hypothesize that natural materials, natural light and diverse representations lead to higher self-reported scores compared to artificial materials, no natural light and non-diverse representations. We find that, while our results vary across individual experiments, the synthesized effects of materials and light on all three dependent measures hold consistent across studies, supporting our hypothesized outcomes. We also examine the influence of seasonality, survey platform and design, and independent variables' dosage on survey results. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges associated with researching the psychological as well as behavioral impacts of design interventions in indoor spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's connection to nature increasingly is of interest in education, psychology, urban planning, and other related fields. Research findings emphasize the central importance of early connections due to resulting benefits for environmental awareness, knowledge, social-emotional learning, health, and wellbeing. To more clearly conceptualize the process by which connection to nature occurs, we studied fifth-grade students (n = 317) from three California schools (12 classrooms) participating in a four-day residential field-study program in different times of the year. The most revealing finding was the influence of weather on developing connection to nature. On average, students participating during inclement weather had significantly lower connection to nature scores on the post-experience than on the pre-experience measures. This insight into the influence of weather led to suggestions about program design, planning, and management of expectations. Although mild weather did not cause an issue for participants, severe weather interfered with developing and maintaining strongly connected nature-related relationships, suggesting that field studies be undertaken with caution during extreme weather.

This mixed-methods study examines an informal place- and community-based environmental education program implemented for rural, underserved high school students in Costa Rica's bio-culturally diverse Osa Peninsula. Using a community-as-pedagogy framework built on Paulo Freire's concept of a problem-posing education, we investigate how pedagogically-positioned social relationships mediate students' knowledge, perceptions, and leadership. We find linkages between existing community resources and endogenous environmental leadership, and suggest how making those connections strengthens students' perceptions of their social relationships and their ability to create meaning and take action. Through the program, students show an increase in knowledge about their local environment. They critically and socially engage with that new information, further developing networking skills in the context of community-informed environmental issues. After participating in the program, the students describe environmental leadership as requiring persistence, forethought, and a willingness to care for both the environment and community.

Decades of research emphasize that information alone rarely influences environmental behavior. We addressed the question of, "what, then, does influence environmental behavior?" by asking more specifically: what factors mediate the relationship between learning about environmentally related issues and engaging in environmentally related behaviors? Following Yin's case study approach, we designed a California (USA)-based case study focused on four everyday-life activities: purchasing food, commuting, engaging in leisure activities, and interacting with mobile technology. We grounded the study in four propositions that previous sociological, psychological, and learning sciences research suggested might influence learning--behavior connections in complex everyday-life contexts. To address the propositions across the four cases, we conducted 197 short, semi-structured interviews grounded in a narrative, relational frame. Using thematic content analysis, we found support for three of our propositions as mediators of learning--behavior connections; we also uncovered two emergent themes. Our findings suggest a web of elements that affect learning--behavior connections; those elements offer insights for environmentally related programming.

This study explores the influence of cognitive (knowledge and certainty) and psychosocial (social norms and efficacy) variables on youth's climate change-related behaviour, with the aim to create an empirically supported theoretical model for youth's choice to take action to mitigate climate change. This survey-based research was conducted with 453 middle and high school students within a large urban area of the western United States. Through structural equation modelling, it was found that knowledge about climate change causes and effects was a weak predictor of behaviour. Whereas social norms accepting of climate change, and the paths from social norms via efficacy and certainty, were strong predictors of behaviour. Certainty of human attribution and efficacy were rather weak predictors, mediating the influence of knowledge and norms. Students' grade level, participation in clubs and number of science classes primarily affected knowledge and social norms. An implication of this study is that if action-taking is an intended outcome of climate change education efforts, then the learning activities should address efficacy and social norms.

Past research has shown that out-of-school time (OST) programs can have substantial benefits for youth, but connecting youth to programs can be challenging for a variety of reasons. To address these challenges, community leaders working with youth in one Silicon Valley community approached the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) at Stanford University wanting to better understand the availability and use of youth OST opportunities. This community has a high number of youth facing multiple risk factors as well as a deep tradition of community service, resulting in a dense network of youth-serving organizations in a relatively small community. Partners wondered why many youth were disconnected from services when there were so many available. In response, the JGC collaborated with this group of partners to design and implement a local, community participatory case study. Combining detailed information about program availability, survey data collected by youth on their peers' OST activities, and crime and transit location data, we used a combination of GIS and quantitative data analyses to examine the supply and demand of youth programming and barriers to accessing those programs. This paper describes the process, methods, and initial findings of this project. (Contains 1 endnote and 2 figures.)

Participants in the 10th International Seminar in Health and Environmental Education Research Symposium in Montebello, Quebec were presented with the challenge of considering the question, "If you could only write one book and one paper in your life from now on, what would the titles be?" The task was structured to stimulate thought around colleagues' most important bits of "unfinished business." This paper provides an overview of responses and reflects on emerging themes of interest in the field of environmental education. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)

Role models may be essential in helping students develop environmental literacy and characteristics associated with positive youth development (PYD). We examine the identities of middle school students' self-reported role models before, immediately after, and three months following an immersive 5-day residential environmental education (EE) experience that targets environmental responsibility, character development and leadership, and attitudes toward school as programmatic outcomes. We explore whether students who identified different types of role models score differently on these factors. Students who identified parents, teachers, and pastors as role models scored higher on each of these outcomes. Moreover, who students identified as role models changed significantly after the EE program. We discuss the potential influence of the program on role model development and implications for EE and PYD programs.

Many practitioners and researchers describe academic and environmental benefits of environmental education for kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) students. To consider the empirical underpinnings of those program descriptions, we systematically analyzed the peer-reviewed literature (1994-2013), focusing on outcomes of environmental education programs with K-12 students. In the resulting sample of 119 articles, we identified 121 unique outcomes, finding that most articles reported positive findings from the programs under study. Reflections stemming from the review highlight the versatility of environmental education, while also suggesting opportunities for bolder and more diversified approaches in research design and thinking.

Nature centers can serve as valuable community institutions if they are seen as providing important services to the community. Through survey research in communities surrounding 16 nature centers in the United States, we examine the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that drive hypothetical support for nature centers from local residents. Respondents who recognized centers as institutions that provide opportunities for leisure and connection with nature; contribute to civic engagement; and bolster local economies, community pride, and aesthetics reported the greatest likelihood of donating, volunteering, or responding to threats at local centers. Additional predictors of support included positive evaluations of staff members, perceptions of positive attitudes toward the center held by other community members, familiarity with center activities, pro-environmental attitudes, and past donation or volunteering. The findings highlight the potential returns for centers that expand their activities and operations beyond more traditional roles of providing nature-based outdoor recreation and environmental education experiences.

While nature center's missions often point to connecting people to nature in various ways, their potential to provide a broader array of services to their communities remains largely unexplored. To better understand the values local community members hold for nature centers, we conducted survey research around 16 centers in the United States. Exploratory factor analysis identified four underlying values: environmental connection, leisure provision, community resilience, and civic engagement. Our limited sample of community respondents felt these values to be important and well-provided by local centers, suggesting centers may play broader roles in communities than inferred from their mission statements. The identification of these distinct value sets provides centers with food for thought regarding not only the services they provide, but also how they might communicate their roles to various constituencies in their communities. The values also provide clear conceptual categories for future research on the values of diverse community institutions.

Trust, a relational phenomenon that is an important building block of interpersonal relationships and within society, can also be an intermediary outcome of field-based environmental education programs. Trust creates a foundation for collaboration and decision-making, which are core to many ultimate outcomes of environmental education. Yet, understanding how trust develops among environmental education program participants is still nascent, partly because few methods exist for measuring trust in informal contexts, such as those that are common for many environmental education programs. Our study used social network analysis and qualitative data from focus groups, questionnaires, and participant observation to investigate the development of trust among residential environmental education program participants in two school groups, some of whom had initial familiarity with each other. Network data indicated differential increases in peer-to-peer trust among group members when measured at the individual level. Qualitative data from the focus groups highlighted salient dimensions of trust that were particularly relevant in this setting, including friendship, emotional and physical safety, and self-disclosure; reciprocal trust among peers and educators; and aspects of this immersive setting that fostered trust among the participants.