Online professional development for environmental educators: strategies to foster critical thinking and social interactions

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer opportunities for professional development of environmental educators globally, yet we lack understanding of participants™ cognitive and social learning processes and of how instructors can enhance these processes. Based on the Community of Inquiry framework, we used a survey and coded participant discussion board and Facebook posts to examine the cognitive, social, and teaching presence in the Environmental Education: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Addressing Wicked Problems MOOC, offered by Cornell University. Rather than train educators in a specific curriculum, the goal of the MOOC is to expand educators™ critical and transdisciplinary thinking about the field of environmental education and to enhance social interactions to support learning, educators, and knowledge co-creation. Results indicate that cognitive presence is higher on the discussion board whereas social presence is higher on Facebook. Over half of cognitive posts focused on exploration, a lower level of learning, whereas just less than a fifth reflected higher level integration, suggesting room for enhancing cognitive learning. Our results suggest strategies to encourage higher levels of thinking and more meaningful social interactions to foster learning, educator support, and co-creation of knowledge, thereby improving online professional development.

Keywords:

• Professional development
• environmental education
• social learning
• critical thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Marianne E Krasny is professor of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University. Her recent books include Civic Ecology (with K Tidball), Urban Environmental Education Review (with A Russ), Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators (with A Armstrong and J Schuldt), and Grassroots to Global. She conducts environmental education online courses for international audiences and is an International Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry.

Bryce DuBois is an Environmental Psychologist who is interested how people learn about, make meaning of, and engage in practices that respond to social-ecological change. He is a lecturer in the History, Philosophy and Social Sciences Department at RISD and a parks consultant.

Alex Russ (Alex Kudryavtsev), PhD, is an environmental education researcher at Cornell University. He is the first editor of the Urban Environmental Education Review (Cornell University Press, 2017), connects urban environmental education and sense of place in his scholarship, and develops online professional development courses for environmental educators.