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- All Subjects: Sustainability Education
Description
This research paper assesses the effectiveness of a remote garden-based learning curriculum in teaching elementary students’ basic systems thinking concepts. Five remote lessons were designed, covering different garden topics, and in order to integrate systems thinking concepts, the Systems Thinking Hierarchical Model was used. This model includes eight emergent characteristics of systems thinking necessary for developing systems thinking competency. Five students were given the remote garden-based learning lessons. Student work was evaluated for systems thinking understanding and student outcomes were compared to anticipated learning outcomes. Results suggest that elementary students are able to understand basic systems thinking concepts because student work met anticipated outcomes for four systems thinking characteristics and exceeded anticipated outcomes for one characteristic. These results are significant because they further confirm that elementary-aged students do have the ability to understand systems thinking and they contribute to a growing movement to integrate sustainability education into elementary curriculum.
ContributorsDussault, Ashley (Author) / Weinberg, Andrea (Thesis director) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Educational institutions are in a unique position to take advantage of computers and software in new, innovative ways. The Mechanics Project at Arizona State University has done an exceptional job integrating many new ways of engaging students and providing resources that can help them learn course material in a way that they can understand. However, there is still very little research on how to best compose multimedia content for student use.
This project aims to determine what students struggle with in these courses and develop multimedia content to support their education in Dynamics specifically.
This project aims to determine what students struggle with in these courses and develop multimedia content to support their education in Dynamics specifically.
ContributorsBadahdah, Adam Salim (Author) / Hjelmstad, Keith (Thesis director) / Chatziefstratiou, Efthalia (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Eng Program (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Games are prolific as an educational medium, and are able to tell a much richer story than pictures or words alone. This has led to the widespread phenomenon known as “gamification” in the educational and business sectors, as well as educational games. While gamification itself is very prolific, its application to sustainability issues has been somewhat limited. With the progression of technology and the high percentage of gamers within the population, the time is ripe for a paradigm shift. Humans have always played games to inform themselves and others, and though this takes many forms, they always will, be their efforts dedicated to education, entertainment, or profit. While teaching and entertainment may sometimes be at odds with one another, they do not have to be. Many audiences respond well to varied forms of entertainment, and when the ability of a thing designed to further educate or gamify is given room to be entertaining as well, all involved benefit. Sustainability as a whole is an incredibly nebulous and broad concept, such that current educational and entertaining games exploring the subject largely addresses it on a smaller scale, or looks at a piece of the picture instead of all of it, as smaller pieces are easier to break down and address. There are ways that games can be and are vehicles for both entertainment and education, and by combining the two end goals in relatively equal measure, a solid platform can be built off of which both learning and personal growth can occur.
ContributorsHarrenstein, Heather Lee (Author) / Breetz, Hanna (Thesis director) / Selgrad, Justin (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Social behavior embodies a central tenet of biology yet social interactions remain fairly undocumented for marine turtles. Marine turtles have been studied extensively yet the importance and prevalence of social behaviors has largely been overlooked within the taxon as a whole. Through this project, new evidence suggests that marine turtles, specifically Hawksbills, may not be as solitary as initially believed yet display a variety of social behaviors. These behaviors suggest that more complex social behaviors exist throughout the taxon and marine turtles may be more social than initially believed. These findings have important conservation management implications and encourages more research into turtle behavior.
ContributorsJohnson, Corinne Eva (Author) / Senko, Jesse (Thesis director) / Gaos, Alexander (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Circles of Sustainability is a self-evaluation tool designed to build educator capacity in K-12 schools seeking sustainability solutions. Based on the Sustainable Schools Challenge Handbook from Memphis, Tennessee, Circles of Sustainability considers environmental impact and efficiency, a healthy and safe school environment, sustainability and environmental education, and engagement and empowerment as four key pillars of whole-school sustainability. Each pillar is composed of elements and rubric items, which are reviewed, totaled, and colored in on the front page of the tool to help educators visualize and evaluate the current state of sustainability at their school. Since its first iteration completed in May 2017, the tool has been used by 300 educators throughout the United States during ASU's Sustainability Teachers' Academy (STA) workshops. Circles of Sustainability is completed as part of an activity called "Evaluating Your Community," where educators complete the tool and then brainstorm sustainability projects and solutions for their school and community. This paper is a review and discussion of the research, informal feedback and formal feedback used to create the second iteration of the tool. A second iteration of the tool was created to make the tool more user-friendly and ensure each pillar, element, and rubric item are based in research. The informal feedback was conducted during STA workshops in Tempe, Arizona; Abingdon, Virginia; Princeton, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; Tucson, Arizona; and Charlotte, North Carolina. The formal feedback was conducted using a survey distributed to teachers who participated in the Tucson and Charlotte workshops. Overall, educators have responded positively to the tool, and the second iteration will continue to be used in future STA workshops throughout the United States.
ContributorsColbert, Julia (Author) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis director) / Merritt, Eileen (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The notion of a teacher is an archaic, dynamic, and diverse concept that is embedded in and therefore revealed in the various complex and coexisting cultural and national contexts, ways of teaching and learning, and the entanglements with beings in multiple worlds. However, under the fundamental impacts of westernization, coloniality, and modernization in the Anthropocene, the concept of a teacher has been endowed with narrow colonial, human-centric, politicalized, as well as vocationalized and secularized connotations. It has been oversimplified to a profession, while other possible interpretations have been omitted and marginalized at the same time. My dissertation questions the implications of the gradual narrowing down of the concept over time and reexamines the concept of a teacher with the aim of ontologically broadening the scope of different connotations and embracing more diverse and inclusive forms as well as contexts of being a ‘teacher.’ In response, this dissertation traces the history, evolution, and cultural contexts of the notion of a teacher in ancient and modern China. It explores the concept of a teacher ontologically through multiple historical and theoretical frames, including decolonial theory in comparative education and several conceptual constructs in Taoism, Confucianism, and posthumanism. Guided by these frames, I introduce innovative (post)qualitative methodologies in data generation and collection, referring to collective re-membering activities, reanimating sense, and speculative fabulation experiences (Haraway, 2013) in terms of “teaching without words/actions,” “sitting and Wu,” and “Ge wu zhi zhi.” This dissertation is designed as a multi-scenario, multi-sense, and multispecies ethnography, and the fieldwork was conducted over three months of summertime in 2022 in a small town and a modern supercity in China. Using a diffractive analysis of memories, stories, and experiences with multiple participants, I attempt to broaden the concept of a teacher by presenting a variety of coexisting conceptualizations of the term and bringing into focus multiple ways of teaching, learning, and being a teacher.
ContributorsJiang, Jieyu (Author) / Silova, Iveta (Thesis advisor) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Wu, Jinting (Committee member) / Anderson, Kate (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
University-level sustainability education in Western academia attempts to focus on eliminating future harm to people and the planet. However, Western academia as an institution upholds systems of oppression and reproduces settler colonialism. This reproduction is antithetical to sustainability goals as it continues patterns of Indigenous erasure and extractive relationships to the Land that perpetuate violence towards people and the planet. Sustainability programs, however, offer several frameworks, including resilience, that facilitate critical interrogations of social-ecological systems. In this thesis, I apply the notion of resilience to the perpetuation of settler colonialism within university-level sustainability education. Specifically, I ask: How is settler colonialism resilient in university-level sustainability education? How are, or could, sustainability programs in Western academic settings address settler colonialism? Through a series of conversational interviews with faculty and leadership from Arizona State University School of Sustainability, I analyzed how university-level sustainability education is both challenging and shaped by settler colonialism. These interviews focused on faculty perspectives on the topic and related issues; the interviews were analyzed using thematic coding in NVivo software. The results of this project highlight that many faculty members are already concerned with and focused on challenging settler colonialism, but that settler colonialism remains resilient in this system due to feedback loops at the personal level and reinforcing mechanisms at the institutional level. This research analyzes these feedback loops and reinforcing mechanisms, among others, and supports the call for anti-colonial and decolonial reconstruction of curriculum, as well as a focus on relationship building, shifting of mindset, and school-wide education on topics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and systems of oppression in general.
ContributorsBills, Haven (Author) / Klinsky, Sonja (Thesis advisor) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Textbooks are crucial in classrooms when it comes to developing lesson plans and curriculum for the classroom. They serve as a way for students to learn more about a certain topic in depth and can improve reading comprehension skills. However, as past studies have shown (Grever and van der Vlies), textbooks can be one-sided and leave out stories and perspectives from marginalized groups, such as African Americans and Indigenous peoples. Multiple perspectives in textbooks allow students to use historical consciousness to reflect how these historical events have an impact on modern society. Arizona has been in a unique political position over the past decade. In 2011, the state legislature passed a bill banning ethnic studies to be taught in schools. This was eventually reversed by the Court in 2017. Recently, the Governor signed two bills regarding education, which are improving curriculum on the Holocaust and banning critical race theory from being taught in schools. Because of Arizona’s geographic diversity, textbook content might vary since Arizona holds the most federally recognized tribes and borders Mexico. To analyze those differences, the 15 counties of Arizona are grouped into five regions, and from each region, one textbook will be analyzed. The textbooks will be coded for each racial community, which will be Asian American, Hispanic American, Black American, and Indigenous American. It is concluded that there is a direct relationship between the textbooks chosen and the racial groups that are covered in these books. Counties that had a larger Indigenous population tended to have a textbook that would cover more Indigenous history.
ContributorsNatarajan, Anusha (Author) / Kappes, Janelle (Thesis director) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor) / School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Amidst mounting global crises spanning environmental, social, and economic domains, sustainability education has emerged as a vital pathway toward a thriving future. However, despite its promise, the concept of sustainability often remains superficial, leaving educators ill-equipped to address its complexities. While efforts to integrate sustainability into education are underway, critical pedagogy, a crucial tool for fostering social change, is notably absent from instructional practices. This action research project utilized critical pedagogy to design and implement a critical professional development (CPD) workshop within a larger fellowship program to center justice within sustainability in both content and pedagogical approach. As a result, participants’ definitions and understandings of sustainability increased across all measurements of extent, breadth, and depth. Specifically, participants redefined collaborative relationships and more prominently included notions of justice and equity in their conceptualizations of sustainability and sustainability education. The use of critical pedagogy encouraged teachers to analyze intersectional oppressive systems and fostered a new, critical perspective on sustainability. In their own educational designs, participants demonstrated an intention to model elements of critical pedagogy, such as dialogic action and permeable content. Finally, in alignment with the intended outcomes of CPD, participants developed cooperative space for co-learning, built unity, shared leadership, and felt confident implementing their own professional development to address context-specific concerns. By using critical pedagogy in sustainability education, the workshop participants prioritized deep and caring relationships which fostered empathic engagement with the intersectional and often dehumanizing systems that have led to interconnected global crises. The results indicated that using CPD as a framework could be effective in teacher professional development for sustainability as a design and implementation tool to center critical work that examines systemic issues of injustice and exploitation against both humans and our planet.
ContributorsCashion, Molly Elise (Author) / Judson, Eugene (Thesis advisor) / Casanova, Carlos (Committee member) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Boyce, Ayesha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
The current sustainability crisis is born from a specious notion that humans are separate from and in a position of control over nature. In response, this dissertation reconceptualizes education beyond its current anthropocentric model to imagine education as learning through relationality with all that is ‘beyond’ the human. The study leaves behind hegemonic binary distinctions (human
ature, teacher/student, formal
on-formal education) to reimagine education as a multidirectional process of learning as worlding and becoming-with Earth (Haraway, 2016a). It explores what matters in education and how it comes to matter.
This dissertation introduces the concept of storyworlding to describe what occurs when multispecies, multi-mattered assemblages (re)write Earth’s narratives through their relationships with one another. Taking its inspiration from the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers, storyworlding acknowledges that the relationships between and among all biotic and abiotic forces on Earth make stories through their interactions, and these stories make a pluriverse of worlds.
The study is structured as a natureculture (Haraway, 2003) ethnography. This innovation on ethnography, a traditionally human-centered method, focuses on agential, multispecies/ multi-mattered assemblages rather than the description of human culture. Data is not generated and then labeled as fixed in this study. It is emergent in its assemblages as a co-narrator in sympoietic storyworlding (Haraway, 2016b).
Data generation took place over 6 months in a small, coffee-producing region of Southeastern Brazil. Data generation methods included walking conversations with children and the more-than-human world, participation in a multi-grade, one-room schoolhouse, and the collection of visual and audio data such as drawings, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
Using an intentionally slow, messy, and fluid diffractive analysis, I follow the data where it leads as I think with the concept of storyworlding (Barad, 2007; Mazzei, 2014). Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Iveta Silova, the dissertation concludes with an Epilogue of speculative fabulation (SF) imaginings through which I invite the reader to engage in the thought experiment of reimagining not only what matters in education, but what education, itself, is.
ature, teacher/student, formal
on-formal education) to reimagine education as a multidirectional process of learning as worlding and becoming-with Earth (Haraway, 2016a). It explores what matters in education and how it comes to matter.
This dissertation introduces the concept of storyworlding to describe what occurs when multispecies, multi-mattered assemblages (re)write Earth’s narratives through their relationships with one another. Taking its inspiration from the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers, storyworlding acknowledges that the relationships between and among all biotic and abiotic forces on Earth make stories through their interactions, and these stories make a pluriverse of worlds.
The study is structured as a natureculture (Haraway, 2003) ethnography. This innovation on ethnography, a traditionally human-centered method, focuses on agential, multispecies/ multi-mattered assemblages rather than the description of human culture. Data is not generated and then labeled as fixed in this study. It is emergent in its assemblages as a co-narrator in sympoietic storyworlding (Haraway, 2016b).
Data generation took place over 6 months in a small, coffee-producing region of Southeastern Brazil. Data generation methods included walking conversations with children and the more-than-human world, participation in a multi-grade, one-room schoolhouse, and the collection of visual and audio data such as drawings, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
Using an intentionally slow, messy, and fluid diffractive analysis, I follow the data where it leads as I think with the concept of storyworlding (Barad, 2007; Mazzei, 2014). Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Iveta Silova, the dissertation concludes with an Epilogue of speculative fabulation (SF) imaginings through which I invite the reader to engage in the thought experiment of reimagining not only what matters in education, but what education, itself, is.
ContributorsGoebel, Janna (Author) / Silova, Iveta (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Beth Blue (Committee member) / Koro, Mirka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020