The overlooked role of academic environmental organizations in addressing environmental education issues

Environmental education quality is one of the most important aspects concerning the present society, being linked to all the facets involved in environmental protection. Universities should play an important role in addressing this problem, by allowing students to develop the necessary experience and skills to become fully able to research and make decisions about the environment. However, environmental education may be regarded as worrying and far from offering solutions, despite the introduction of many environmental courses and study programmes in most important universities. Studies regarding children's perception of the environment (Snaddon, Turner, & Foster, 2008; Walshe, 2008) show that their thoughts are not too worrying, but when similar studies are performed on undergraduate students, the results are disappointing (Liu & Lin, 2015). Additionally, it is believed that environmental study programmes are quite inefficient (Clark et al., 2011a). Generally speaking, in various fields such as climate change or restoration ecology, it can be noticed that universities are not fully involved in a serious and comprehensive manner in addressing the global issues affecting the environment (Nelson, Schoennagel, & Gregory, 2008, Lemons, 2011).

Organizing and governing an environmental study programme or course poses several challenges (Clark et al., 2011b) which are too difficult to overcome by simple restructuring. Several improvements are needed, such as including to a greater extent interdisciplinarity in the curriculum, but setting up an ideal environmental programme faces serious issues including the differences between knowledge and expectations, the difficulty of integrating problem solving in real-world contexts and the risks of challenging institutional norms. Attempts at curriculum improvement have been shown to fail or to generate results that were far from expectations, as the changes were not aimed at a broad level and there was a lack of academic staff willingness to act accordingly (de la Harpe & Thomas, 2009). A pedagogy change in environmental education is also needed in order to allow students to solve particular environmental problems by collaborating with faculty members from various disciplines (Clark et al., 2011b).

As governments and corporations are increasingly looking for well-prepared graduates with good environmental knowledge and skills, we argue that students need to get in touch with decision-makers and potential employers in order to get acquainted with the real environmental-related processes. Education through field practice is mostly undervalued (Bakker & Howell, 2011) and we may state that other types of practice such as visits to research laboratories, corporations and talks with decision makers are rarely mentioned in the literature, yet should be equally important to field practice. Since environmental issues are of community importance, students should also get in touch with community members by organizing specific public activities or through talks or co-volunteering.

A novel and overlooked approach that addresses the weaknesses of other solutions to the issues described is the academic environmental organization (AEO), which is based at a university, formed by faculty members, specialists and students, preferably having one mentor (usually a professor), providing a framework where each member shares its knowledge and skills in an interdisciplinary way, contributing to solving environmental problems and getting involved with the community, while employing various pedagogy strategies. Interdisciplinarity would therefore be a main pillar of any AEO, by organizing various field trips, summer schools, workshops, or by involving in environmental projects, where students test their learned skills, teaching staff shares its knowledge and experienced specialists contribute with the implementation of field methods. Environmental education would fill the needs of each student to learn how to solve real-world situations, to share their ideas and to confront them with teachers' opinions and experience. An AEO may build partnerships with different institutions, such as schools, research laboratories, corporations, recycling companies, but also with decision-making institutions. In this way, students can test their knowledge not only as learners, but also as tutors or observers and to exercise their skills on influencing decision-makers and on how the actual decision-making processes function.

Several AEOs have been founded, having the goal of improving higher education for environmental students while addressing environmental problems as a whole. The Citizens' Environmental Watch (CEW) is an AEO based at the University of Toronto, Canada, which uses community-based research and volunteering environmental monitoring to mainly address the reduction in public expenditure towards environmental protection (Savan, Morgan, & Gore, 2003). Students are able to work on community environmental projects and to conduct various researches, gaining valuable experience. CEW collects and analyzes monitoring data, such as chemical parameters and biological indicators, from volunteers, students and community groups, and provides the results to policy makers and various governmental environmental organizations.

The Environmental Sciences Organization (ESO) at the University of Virginia, USA, provides a link between the Environmental Sciences Department and affiliated students. This organization's website (https://atuva.student.virginia.edu/organization/environmentalsciencesorganization) states that “the organization is mainly geared toward undergraduate majors and minors in the department”, having “its share of members from many different disciplines of the University”. Students have the chance to get to know the professors from the department, but are also provided with the opportunity to take part at “what the department has to offer outside of a major or minor”. The Department provides different courses, outdoor activities, and resources and the members of ESO are aided in collaborating within these various activities.

The University Regional Research Consortium for Environmental Monitoring and Protection (CCRMPM), placed at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania, was initiated and is currently led by a professor, reporting 250 activities and actions within various successfully implemented projects, such as the “Biodiversity Caravan” and greening campaigns (Toma, 2014). CCRMPM partners with student organizations in field ecology schools and workshops and students are frequently involved in professional collaborations, for documentation and research, in the affiliated laboratories, ensuring a better contact with their fields of interest and job opportunities.

By using various strategies and forming relations with the community and even with decision-makers, guided by the success of several established organizations, we believe that the AEO approach has a high potential and should be taken into account in any University which educates environmental specialists, making it a good candidate to become an interesting trend and way of managing current environmental challenges.