Does environmental education work differently across sociopolitical contexts in the United States? Part II. Examining pedagogy in school field trip programs for early adolescent youth across political contexts

Abstract

Political polarization in the United States has made many environmental issues strongly partisan, with Democrats largely receptive to environmental messaging and Republicans commonly pitted against it. This phenomenon may have meaningful implications for how environmental education is conducted for people from different sociopolitical contexts. We explored whether certain pedagogical approaches to single-day environmental education field trip programs were linked to better or worse outcomes for early adolescent youth (ages 10–14) from different sociopolitical contexts: majority Republican, majority Democrat, or mixed (roughly even). All observed effect sizes were small with one exception. Play-based pedagogies tended to yield less positive outcomes for students from Republican majority contexts than others, with a medium effect size. The findings suggest that some traditional approaches to play, such as role-playing as animals or pretending to be water droplets, may feel incongruent with the social identities of students from largely Republican communities.

Keywords:

• Democrats
• environmental education
• environmental literacy
• geographic sorting
• politics
• Republicans

Acknowledgements

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 were unable to incorporate other socioeconomic factors in this analysis to maintain sufficient statistical power to examine interaction effects.

2 The original, uncondensed observations can be found in the Supplemental Materials.

3 Some argue that the ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ and its emphasis on meeting educational standards has limited creativity in EE and its ability to enhance environmental literacy in the U.S. (Gruenewald and Manteaw 2007; Stevenson 2007). We witnessed many programs that felt roughly equivalent to classroom science lab assignments, rather than exhibiting best practices promoted by EE experts and practitioners (Krasny 2020; NAAEE 2020b; Stern, Powell, and Hill 2014).

Additional information

Funding

The 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.