Environmental Education Research Bulletin

Environmental activist Jane Goodall once said, “Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. Only if we help shall we be saved.” This perspective suggests the importance of coupling a range of variables—such as emotion, skills development, or self-efficacy—in order to influence environmental behavior. This study explored the relationship of knowledge and emotion with environmentally related behaviors. Specifically, the researchers asked: What role do emotions play in bringing about pro-environmental behaviors?

Youth from non-dominant groups—whether racial and/ or ethnic groups, or others—often face identity-related barriers to participating in nature-based activities and science practices. Shared notions of “outdoorsy people” and “scientists,” for example, may be at odds with some people's sense of self and the ways their identities are expressed in the place they live, what they do, and with whom they associate. Identity-based obstacles can pose a serious challenge, then, if environmental educators desire for all young people to understand and care about biodiversity.

Researchers and practitioners have documented gardens as part of schoolyards and pedagogical practices since at least the early 1900s, although they may have been part of educational practices, and certainly daily life, even earlier than that. Some of the many touted benefits of schoolyard gardens include providing active, engaging, real-world experiences; enhancing students' connection to nature; offering a setting for integrated, holistic learning; and fostering nature-related values. Yet one may ask what impact school gardens actually have on student learning.

Science and environmental educators in the United States have faced increasing pressure to incorporate inquiry-based, hands-on, active science practices into their curricula since the Next Generation Science Standards were released in 2013. Many of those educators, however, are concerned that there are not enough professional development opportunities to help improve practices around around teaching science and engaging with the new standards.

Having prior knowledge of learner expectations can help educators design experiences in ways that meet visitors' needs. In the case of zoos, however, little is known about the intentions and expectations that visitors bring with them to a zoo visit; in other words, most educators know little about what visitors hope to learn and what experiences they expect to have. Therefore, this paper's authors investigated the relationship between zoo visitors' learning expectations and zoo staff members' perceptions of visitor learning agendas.

One of the biggest challenges of environmental education is figuring out how and why people decide to engage in environmental behavior. Borrowing from the fields of communication and marketing research, this study's researchers used a case study in Nevada to shed light on people's decision-making processes related to environmentally sustainable behaviors. The findings could help inform the way that environmental educators address environmental behaviors, more generally, and energy-related behaviors, more specifically.

Museums facilitate free-choice learning experiences or self-guided exploration driven by one's own curiosity. The self-directed nature of these settings allows visitors to follow their own interests, build on past experiences, engage in personalized meaning-making, and create both individual as well as social learning experiences that are tailored to one's own motivations. Yet, within these self-directed contexts, multiple objects often compete for attention, resulting in a splintered focus.

As climate change becomes more serious, the need for environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) for young people and in schools is increasingly relevant. Traditionally, EE has aimed to help students better understand causes, impacts, and solutions to environmental issues and inspire critical thinking around ethical issues, conflicts, and uncertainties.

In recent years, employers have increasingly emphasized the importance of leadership training and service learning in developing workforce skills. Moreover, researchers have found service learning to have a positive impact on leadership development. In this article, the author provides direction in planning, developing, and implementing a service-learning course that helps students develop leadership skills through experiential education. The author bases this advice on eight years of instructing and iteratively refining a service-learning course called Community Leadership.

Skilled educators know that using a diversity of teaching approaches and strategies can create a more engaging learning environment for students. Science education researchers are interested in exploring the ways in which varied pedagogical approaches might influence science-learning outcomes and documenting those processes in practice. To that end, this paper's authors undertook a qualitative research study examining how science education with early childhood audiences might be more effective when it transcends simple hands-on or activity-based pedagogies.