Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm

Abstract

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.

Influencing Generations: Pre-service teachers’ environmental worldviews at a South African university

“…Anthropocentric worldviews arguably cultivate the exploitation of the environment for human gain regardless of the sustainability of this exploitation. In order to change this worldview and foster environmentally responsible behaviour, it has been argued that society needs to improve environmental literacy, which in turn will shift people's beliefs or value systems as they relate to the environment (Woodworth, et al, 2011;Ling, et al, 2020).…”

Educating for the Environment: The Role of the Host Destination in Education Travel Programs

“…Even more effective at achieving sustainabilityrelated outcomes are the programs that specifically focus on issues of the environment and sustainability [3,14,15]. Several studies have demonstrated that learning outcomes for pro-environmental behaviors are much more significant on sustainability-focused ETPs versus other ETPs [16,17].…”

“…Dvorak and others engaged their students in developing their own personal carbon offsets that derive from lifestyle changes rather than a third-party purchase. Ling and others [16] use "socio-scientific issues" in their programs that engage students with local stakeholders to debate and develop solutions.…”

Shaping Pro-Environmental Attitudes through Higher Education—A Preliminary Study

“…There are many studies about the effectiveness of stand-alone sustainability courses [17][18][19][20][21] or general university studies oriented partly towards sustainability [20,[22][23][24][25]. Some previous studies showed that even stand-alone sustainability courses [21,26] and education oriented for sustainability [22][23][24][25] are only partially successful in changing the attitudes of students.…”