“The tree was there first” – using an everyday ecological dilemma to explore the personal orientations of secondary school students in environmental decision-making

Abstract

Studies have repeatedly shown that the goals of environmental education are as indispensable as they are difficult to achieve. In particular, the discrepancy between environmental awareness and everyday actions seems to be particularly large and strongly dependent on personal factors. Against this background, the authors argue that the evaluation of everyday environmental situations should be considered and different personal orientations should be addressed. In a study among more than 1,100 secondary school students in Germany and Austria, an instrument was developed and tested that focuses on an everyday environmental dilemma and its evaluation. The use of this instrument identified five types of student orientations, each of which was accompanied by a typical evaluation pattern. The authors conclude that the instrument is applicable to educational practice as classroom tool, to identify students’ environmental orientations and develop teaching programmes that can deal with these personal predispositions in an appropriate and differentiating manner.

Keywords:

• Dilemma
• decision making
• environmental self-identity
• secondary school students
• environmental orientations
• plant blindness
• religious education
• biology education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all students and teachers involved in this study for their cooperation. We are grateful to Astrid Hesse and Maren Hornberger for contributing to early versions of the questionnaire as well as to Simon Ferel for supporting initial data analyses. Finally, the excellent proofreading by Dr. John Chandler is greatly acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

None.

Notes

1 Multifarious historical and cultural relationships connect Germany and Austria, which are also reflected by a close connection between the two school systems. For example, religious education in both countries is a compulsory school subject. It is offered as denominational teaching, although students of other denominations or those without religious affiliation are also allowed to participate. The question how biology and religious education can cooperate in environmental education in general schools is therefore of particular and practical relevance in both countries. Due to institutionally given cooperations and for practical research reasons, this study focuses on Christian religious education.

2 Following Marder’s phytocentric paradigm, plants are accorded a status of living individuality, which as a “vast green blind spot” (Marder 2014, 241–42), calls for an appreciation of vegetal life with respect to ecological issues. Interestingly, the concept of “plant blindness”, which assumes that humans are human-centered and tend to devalue the status of plants as living organisms (Wandersee and Schussler 2001, 1999), addresses this issue from an educational perspective.

3 Ward’s method follows a non-overlapping approach and allows for minimisation of within-cluster variance. Clustering directly over the entire sample appeared to be problematic to us because of completely different contexts and survey dates. Therefore, we first calculated clusters for the German sample and then used them to classify the participants from Austria accordingly. For this purpose, each case was assigned to the cluster having the smallest distance from the cluster centre (Euclidean distance). Thus, it was possible to generate homogeneous clusters and to maximise inter-cluster heterogeneity.