Improving energy literacy through student-led fieldwork – at home

Abstract

“Energy literacy” is of great interest to those researching sustainable consumption, particularly with regard to its relationship to domestic energy use. This paper reflects on the pedagogic aspects of fieldwork recently carried out by undergraduate geography students in their own homes to assess energy-related technologies and practices, and how these come together into a singular, aggregated number produced by the energy meter. Conceptualising energy literacy as comprising cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains, we evaluate the experiences reported by the students, and discuss next steps in expanding the exercise and learning.

Keywords:

• Energy literacy
• energy citizens
• domestic energy use
• fieldwork
• pedagogy
• active learning

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the students who trialed the exercise and shared their experiences with us. We thank John Farquhar, Erika Warnatzsch, and three anonymous referees for their useful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Students were notified that their responses would be used anonymously as part of this study.

2. In order to simplify the exercise, we did not engage the students with the temporal and spatial variability of the carbon intensity of the grid.

3. During the period of the pilot study, the mean high temperature was 85 °F (29.4 °C) with 362 cooling degree days.