Synopsis
While there is mounting evidence that Education for Sustainability (EfS) is expanding beyond the disciplinary confines of natural science and geography classrooms, little is known about the prevalence of EfS throughout an entire higher education curriculum. Therefore, this dissertation aimed to capture a bird’s eye view of EfS across a higher education curriculum by exploring the amount of, and the effectiveness of, EfS in an institution of higher education and to analyze whether EfS was related to students’ sustainability learning outcomes. To do so, the first part of this study mapped out the extent to which students had the opportunity to learn about sustainability and the pedagogical practices they experienced during this learning. From there, the second part of the study analyzed the structural relationships between having the opportunity to learn about sustainability and experiencing promising practices of teaching and learning, and their influence on students’ sustainability learning outcomes.
Data collection for this dissertation study took place at Michigan State University (MSU), a public, large-size, four-year institution. Students were surveyed at both the beginning and end of the fall 2017 semester to measure changes over one academic semester. Guided by the frameworks of opportunity to learn, cognitively responsive teaching, teaching for sustainability, and transformative sustainability learning outcomes, data were analyzed with logistic and ordinary least squares regression, and structural equation modeling (SEM).
Amongst other key findings, results found that when all else was held constant, the second cognitively responsive teaching construct influenced sustainability-related behavior learning outcomes. In other words, when instructors surfaced students’ prior knowledge about sustainability while teaching the subject, students’ sustainability behaviors increased over the course of the semester. Although exploratory, this dissertation study provides preliminary evidence that supports the pedagogy of using students’ prior knowledge of sustainability-specific subject matter to teach them new sustainability-related ideas, practices, and skills.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Conferring University: Teachers College, Columbia University (New York, NY), 2019
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