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Overview
- Indiana University Press
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Overview Doug Karpa Campus Instructional Consulting As outlined so far, environmental literacy encompasses a body of interdisciplinary knowledge including the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of human–environment interactions. We have suggested that this knowledge can be e√ectively organized around three broad themes: ecosystem services (or human dependence on ecosystems), ecological footprint (or human domination of ecosystems ), and sustainability (or human alliance with ecosystems). We have also emphasized that being environmentally literate involves much more than merely being well-informed about the intertwined social, economic, and environmental questions of our age; the environmentally literate citizen also has the skills and the sense of engagement to make reasoned evaluations and to take action based on them. Thus, as we consider how to teach environmental literacy, we look for approaches that foster acquisition of the contextual information needed to assess issues, the conceptual, analytical, and action skills needed to interpret and apply new information, and, perhaps most importantly, a strong sense of place and connectedness to the world, both natural and social, to motivate action. In the essays in this section, each author describes an approach he or she has used outside of the traditional classroom context for promoting environmental literacy in these interconnected dimensions. Students who become environmentally literate citizens will have developed an understanding of disciplinary thinking from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, and, importantly, the connections among them, much as is advocated 112 ⭈ doug karpa in liberal learning initiatives. Moreover, cognitive skills that undergird environmental literacy are closely related to various definitions of ‘‘critical thinking.’’ The action skills and connectedness that form such an important part of environmental literacy are not so di√erent from the engagement and the social connectedness goals of teachers focused on civic engagement and cultural awareness. Thus, successful teaching of environmental literacy moves student proficiency along a wide range of learning priorities—liberal, critical, civic, and cultural—in a wide range of disciplines and in thoughtful engagement with the world beyond the university classroom. The Learners: The Demography of Teaching Environmental Literacy The vision of environmental literacy in this book stems in part from an imperative for a society facing great challenges. Given this origin, our vision must reach beyond the already engaged students across the student body, engaging not only the uninformed but also those who are indi√erent, resistant, or hostile to ‘‘the environment’’ and/or sustainability. Introducing students to the values of environmental literacy invites conflict with other, competing notions and priorities that prevail in society. In fact, this reorientation may not be so exceptional, since such conflicts are already part of much of higher education. Still, the wide variety of postures students hold with respect to the various facets of environmental literacy makes inviting them into the discussion, potentially, a complex task. Students not only bring an entire range of attitudes toward environmental literacy and its components, but they also di√er in the cognitive skills and a√ective connections they have developed before arriving in our classrooms. For example, they may understand facts without having strong analytical skills, they may have strong analytical skills without any sense of connection to their world, or they may feel a strong connection to place without much factual understanding or analytical ability. Contemplating Many Paths Toward Environmental Literacy Teaching environmental literacy is thus a task of broad scope undertaken in a highly diverse context of student experiences, one that requires a variety of pedagogical tools. The chapters in this section propose teaching beyond the traditional four corners of the classroom. As a supplement, alternative, or even substitute for the more conventional approaches to teaching, the venues described in this section open a welcome door out of the classroom, where we find an entire other set of pragmatically useful tools to communicate with and foster growth in our students. Beyond the walls of the classroom, the teacher of [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 15:05 GMT) Overview ⭈ 113 environmental literacy may find those new ideas for teaching to be a breath of fresh air. The chapters in this section address the challenge of student diversity by bringing students into the complex ‘‘real’’ world. There they can practice an environmental ethic in which the authors in this section find two common threads. First, these authors tend to conceive of environmental literacy as an opportunity for solving real-world problems. The pedagogies they describe do not so much distill or conceptualize the world for performance on...