Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm
1
Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
2
Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
3
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(19), 8258; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198258
Received: 9 September 2020 / Revised: 29 September 2020 / Accepted: 2 October 2020 / Published: 7 October 2020
(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Education and Approaches)
Higher education institutions are tasked with education for sustainable development, of which the environment is a central pillar. Understanding the demographic factors that influence the establishment of environmental worldviews allows educators to better contextualize sustainability content and discussion. Identifying pedagogies capable of creating learning spaces within which worldviews can shift offers similar opportunities. Using a quasi-experimental design and model building, this study identifies important social psychological antecedents of environmental beliefs, assesses the effectiveness of outbound mobility pedagogy at changing those beliefs and identifies important predictors of the nature and magnitude of those changes. Sustainable outbound mobility courses were effective at increasing environmental worldview compared to a control group. At program commencement, political orientation and business majors were negatively associated with environmental worldview, while female gender was the reverse. For sustainability education courses, only gender was retained as a significant predictor of the nature and change of environmental worldview by the course’s end. These results suggest that the factors associated with environmental worldview upon commencement of a course do not necessarily predict the malleability of that worldview in higher education students.
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Keywords:
sustainability education; environmental worldview; new ecological paradigm; outbound mobility; quasi-experimental
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MDPI and ACS Style
Ling, S.; Landon, A.; Tarrant, M.; Rubin, D. Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm. Sustainability 2020, 12, 8258. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198258
AMA Style
Ling S, Landon A, Tarrant M, Rubin D. Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm. Sustainability. 2020; 12(19):8258. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198258
Chicago/Turabian StyleLing, Simon, Adam Landon, Michael Tarrant, and Donald Rubin. 2020. "Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm" Sustainability 12, no. 19: 8258. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198258
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