A. Modelling the variables that predict responsible environmental citizenship
Value-Belief-Norm theory
This theory links 3 elements:
1. Moral Norm Activation: "Proenvironmental actions occur in response
to personal moral norms about such actions... these are activated in individuals
who believe that environmental conditions pose threats to other people,
other species, or the biosphere (awareness of consequences)" (Stern et
al, 1999, 85).
2. Personal Values: Three distinct clusters of personal values form
the bases for environmental concern. These are:
1) self-interest, self-enhancement, or egocentric values3. New Ecological Paradigm: Adoption of a worldview that "human actions have substantial adverse effects on a fragile biophere," measured by a very widely used sociological scale (recently revised: Dunlap, et al, 2001).
2) altruism toward other humans and other species (the latter may be distinctly held only by some segments of the Americans)
3) Traditionalist values.
All 3 are subject to the person's level of the "openness to change values" variable.
1. This model is based on the component objectives of EE as laid out
in the Tbilisi conference declaration (Awareness, Sensitivity, Attitudes,
Skills and Participation).
2. However, it departs from traditional simplistic assumptions that
if people are made more knowledgeable (ie, of environmental problems),
then they will in turn be more aware, and further motivated to act more
responsibly. Research does not support this view.
3. Hungerford and Volk found three types of variables in the literature
(entry-level, ownership and empowerment) and hypothesized that they are
linked in a roughly linear fashion, eventuating in citizenship behaviors.
Action Research and Revised Positive Environmental Action Model
1. Action Research (Fig. 1) proposes a continuous, recursive process
of learning and action. The steps involve developing a plan that will help
solve a collectively chosen problem, implementing the plan, and evaluating
its effectiveness. At numerous points, additional plans may be generated
and pursued. As evaluation occurs, learning feeds back into the selection
of further problems, plans and implementation strategies. The whole learning
process takes place within the student's real community.
2. Emmons's qualitative research made her question the idea that one
could understand the development of environmental action based on various
predictor variables. Instead, she produced a Revised Positive Environmental
Action Model (Fig. 2) emphasizes how the variables involved are "interactive,
dynamic and greatly influenced by the participants and the social situations
within which they operate" (p. 34).
3. The model emphasizes the roles of intentional and independent action,
the integration of learning areas, and the interactive relationship between
learning and action.
4. The interactive relationship between learning and action refers
to the reciprocity as students go through repeated cycles of action, reflection,
revision. Through this learner-driven process, new skills are developed
and then marshaled later as inputs in the next action/learning phase.
5. Learners act in their "own particular social situations" in a continuous
dynamic process of setting goals, acting, and growing as a result.
Ecological concepts
1. Across ages 5 to 16 years, younger children think in terms of individual
organisms, and do not conceptualize ecosystems as interdependent groups
of organisms. Some younger children think of animals as dependent on human
provisioning to meet basic needs.
2. After age 9 years, use of anthropomorphic reasoning to explain the
relative abundance of organisms at different trophic levels (producers,
consumers, etc.) was rare.
3. Between ages 7 and 16 years "interdependence" reasoning increased
and teleological concepts decreased.
4. Children tend to trace effects up rather than down through food
webs, for example reasoning differently about the removal of a top predator
(tracing fewer links to other ecosystem parts) than about the removal of
producers.
5. Some children showed sophisticated knowledge of natural phenomena,
but even among the oldest students and after instruction, descriptive and
teleological reasoning exceeded population-based interdependence reasoning.
6. 5th-graders' have difficulty in understanding the concept of food
webs. Population sizes and relations of different trophic levels, niche
specificity, and connections with everyday experience proved difficult
to grasp.
Children's ecological misconceptions include the following:
1. Higher trophic levels eat everything below rather than being restricted
in niche
2. the top organism gets the most energy
3. some ecosystems have limitless carrying capacity
4. the needs and roles of a species are general and typical of similar
species rather than being unique
5. species "get along" (co-exist) because their behaviors and needs
are compatible
6. food chains are simple chains and not complex webs
7. Simplistic thinking found among 11-year-olds who completed
a month-long unit that involved constructing and manipulating mini-ecosystems:
8. Nearly 2/3 of the students noted effects of a pollutant only when
it directly contacted an organism.
9. Children import forms of reasoning from domains of human action,
or from simpler causal models typical of familiar mechanical systems in
attempting to explain ecological causality.
Connecting animals to ecosystems
1. First-graders study had unorganized conceptions of where animals
lived, assigning even sharks indiscriminantly to the forest.
2. the variables of "positive responsiveness to natural environments"
and learning about animals were positively associated among 10- and 12-year-olds
3. Five- and eight-year-olds ignore habitat as a criteria for categorizing
animals, but so did many 10- and 14-year-olds.
4. ecologically-based interdependence was the most frequent reason
given by 6th- and 10th-graders for saving endangered species found, but
type of reason also varied by the type of living thing
5. Some children feel some organisms (tree, worm, insect, grass, bird
and lizard) should be saved because other things depend on them, but others
(bacteria, jellyfish, starfish, and toadstool) are not worth saving because
they were useless, apparently having no known role to the child.
6. Children may tend to value something in the environment to the extent
they believe it meets the needs of something else.
7. Over childhood, knowledge of animals' basic physiological needs
develops early; understanding of ecological and conservation needs (linking
individual animals with ecosystems) develops gradually and steadily through
middle childhood and early adolescence.
8. Both aesthetic and psychologically-oriented ways of thinking of
animals and nature complement and for some children may predominate over
science-based understandings of animals.
C. Development of participation & cooperation