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Educating for Sustainability is a framework for motivating sustainable behavior change through educational interventions focused on non-traditional domains of knowledge. This collection includes peer reviewed journal articles and data.

Displaying 11 - 13 of 13
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Educating for Sustainability: Competencies & Practices for Transformative Action

Description
Achieving a sustainable future requires that individuals adopt different values, attitudes, habits, and behaviors, which are often learned and cemented at a young age. Unfortunately, current educational efforts are inadequate for achieving transformative action. Even programs whose primary goal is to promote responsible, pro-environmental behaviors have largely failed at creating…

Achieving a sustainable future requires that individuals adopt different values, attitudes, habits, and behaviors, which are often learned and cemented at a young age. Unfortunately, current educational efforts are inadequate for achieving transformative action. Even programs whose primary goal is to promote responsible, pro-environmental behaviors have largely failed at creating change among students. The lack of efficacy in sustainability-related educational programs is at least partly due to faulty assumptions about knowledge automatically leading to action, and by extension, the information- intensive methods that focus largely on declarative knowledge regarding how environmental systems work. Meanwhile, social science literature clearly highlights the need to go beyond ecological and technical knowledge when educating for transformative action, since sustainable behaviors are motivated by much more than declarative information. In order to effectively educate for sustainability, alternative forms of knowledge (i.e., procedural, effectiveness, and social knowledge) are essential, as is the consideration of various barriers and motivators for action. The transition towards sustainability will require action and change that is guided by an understanding of the complexities that arise within an interconnected system, as well as the ability to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, while keeping an eye to the future. In formulating our approach to educating for sustainability, we incorporate perspectives from three somewhat disparate fields: (i) behavioral change research, (ii) sustainability scholarship, and (iii) educational pedagogy. While drawing upon diverse knowledge domains, our primary purpose is to integrate behavior change research and sustainability competencies in developing effective educational approaches for transformative actions.
Key
ContributorsRedman, Erin (Lead, Author) / Larson, Kelli (Author)
Created2011-03

Is Subjective Knowledge the Key to Fostering Sustainable Behavior? Mixed Evidence From an Education Intervention in Mexico. (Pre-Print)

Description

Educational interventions are a promising way to shift individual behaviors towards Sustainability. Yet as this research confirms, the standard fare of education, declarative knowledge, does not work. This study statistically analyzes the impact of an intervention designed and implemented in Mexico using the Educating for Sustainability (EfS) framework which focuses…

Educational interventions are a promising way to shift individual behaviors towards Sustainability. Yet as this research confirms, the standard fare of education, declarative knowledge, does not work. This study statistically analyzes the impact of an intervention designed and implemented in Mexico using the Educating for Sustainability (EfS) framework which focuses on imparting procedural and subjective knowledge about waste through innovative pedagogy. Using data from three different rounds of surveys we were able to confirm:

1. The importance of subjective and procedural knowledge for Sustainable behavior in a new context.
2. The effectiveness of the EfS framework.
3. The importance of changing subjective knowledge for changing behavior.

Yet, while the impact was significant in the short term, one year later most if not all of those gains had evaporated. Interventions targeted at subjective knowledge will work, but more research is needed on how to make behavior change for durable sustainability.
ContributorsRedman, Aaron (Lead, Author) / Redman, Erin (Author)
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Redman 2016 Appendix Draft