Does environmental education work differently across sociopolitical contexts in the United States? PART I. Exploration of outcomes for adolescent youth

Abstract

In the United States, the two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, have become increasingly polarized, including with regard to environmental issues. As part of a national study of environmentally focused single-day field trips for early adolescent youth in 2018, we conducted exploratory research to examine how outcomes differed for public school students from different sociopolitical contexts (i.e. predominantly Democratic, Republican, or mixed). Students from wealthier Democratic contexts exhibited less positive outcomes, measured as self-reported changes in environmental literacy, compared to others. The findings suggest that single-day EE field trips in the United States, in their current forms, may be particularly valuable in lower income and more politically conservative contexts, possibly due to the degree of novelty they may provide to these audiences. Meanwhile, EE field trips for students from wealthier Democratic contexts may provide reinforcement rather than meaningful shifts in environmental literacy, suggesting a need for more novel approaches for these audiences.

Keywords:

• Democrats
• field trips
• adolescents
• politics
• republicans

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ryan Dale, Kaitlyn Hogarth, Tori Kleinbort, Hannah Lee, Eric Neff, Anna O’Hare, Daniel Pratson, and Neil Savage, who collected the field data for this project, and the 90 organizations around the United States who welcomed their presence. We’d also like to thank Dr. Shannon Bell and Dr. Karin Kitchens for their comments and input on the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We refer to the field trips as “programs” throughout the manuscript, as the experiences all involved a planned set of activities with on-site educators.

2 Using precinct-level election returns provides us with a sharper representation of students’ immediate sociopolitical context than if we were to use school district or county-level data, which produce coarser illustrations of partisan turnout and may obscure variation between schools within the same district (Kitchens, 2021; Kinsella, McTague, and Raleigh 2015; Myers, 2013).

3 We also examined relationships between groups’ sociopolitical context and socioeconomic status, race, and urbanity. In short, participants from Republican contexts tended to be Whiter, wealthier, and live in more suburban or rural areas, whereas participants from Democratic areas tended to be more racially diverse, urban, and of lower socioeconomic status (see supplemental tables). All subsequent analyses eliminate the effects of grade level and race through group-mean-centering of the dependent variable, EE21. For a more thorough examination of the relationship between race and program outcomes, see Stern, Powell, and Frensley (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Education program (DRL 1612416 and DRL 1906610) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant (MG-10-16-0057-16) and analysis was supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, McIntire-Stennis project 7001451.

Notes on contributors

Emily G. Thorpe

Emily Thorpe completed her Master of Science degree in Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech in 2022, drawing inspiration from her time as an environmental educator in the Chesapeake Bay region. She currently works for a small business, helping to develop and maintain multi-stakeholder collaborative partnerships with a focus on community development and environmental conservation.

Marc J. Stern

Marc Stern is a professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in environmental education and interpretation, social science research methods, and the human dimensions of natural resource management and sustainability. His research focuses on human behavior within the contexts of natural resource planning and management, environmental communications, and education. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Interpretation Research.

Robert B. Powell

Bob Powell is the George B. Hartzog, Jr. Endowed Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management and the Dept. of Forestry and Environmental Conservation at Clemson University and the Director of the Institute for Parks, which is an interdisciplinary institute focused on providing research, training, and outreach to support park and protected area management. His research and outreach program focuses on environmental education, interpretation, park and protected areas, and sustainable tourism. With Stern, he is the co-editor of the Journal of Interpretation Research.

Tyler L. Hemby

Tyler Hemby completed his Master of Science degree in Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech in 2016. He later served in the Peace Corps in Mexico and then as a Research Associate in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management at Clemson University from 2019-2022.