Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm

Simon Ling, Adam Landon, Michael Tarrant and Donald Rubin
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Simon Ling: Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
Adam Landon: Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Michael Tarrant: Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
Donald Rubin: Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 19, 1-19

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.

Keywords: sustainability education; environmental worldview; new ecological paradigm; outbound mobility; quasi-experimental (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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