Diversity Beyond Demographics: Environmental Worldviews of Forestry and Natural Resource Undergraduate Students

In U.S. academic institutions, efforts often concentrate on enhancing the recruitment of students from underrepresented groups, focusing on gender and/or race. Yet, non-demographic forms of diversity have received little attention, such as environmental worldviews, i.e., differences in the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical beliefs that define how humans view, value, and interact with the natural world. Here, we develop an exploratory measure of environmental worldview diversity among undergraduate students enrolled in natural resource related programs. We tested our procedure at Oregon State University, a large public land-grant university in the US. Many students reported metaphysical, epistemological, and/or ethical beliefs that deviate from what has been philosophically characterized as the dominant western worldview of natural resources (anthropocentric, dualistic, hierarchical, utilitarian, mechanistic). Our results suggest that, although forestry students’ environmental worldviews are in some ways more closely aligned with the dominant western worldview than other students in natural resources, generally their worldviews reflect long-term generational shifts away from a strict resource-commodity value orientation, as documented in past research. Our findings highlight the importance of considering environmental worldviews as a dimension of diversity within the new generation natural resource students. Future efforts toward understanding these levels of difference can be important assets in designing programs which appeal to wide variety of students; ultimately helping efforts to recruit and retain a diverse of aspiring natural resource professionals.

Ekološki pogledi na svet učenika osnovne i srednje škole - primena NEP skale

Attitudes towards environment represent the ways individuals perceive the world around them. Such attitudes are worth exploring because they frequently determine the behavior that either increases or decreases the quality of the environment. The aim of the paper is to investigate elementary and high school students' environmental worldviews and to determine the dimensionality of the NEP Scale on our sample. In addition, the aim of the paper is point to potential differences betweeen boys and girls as well as students with different school achievements. The environmental worldviews were analyzed using the NEP Scale (New Environmental/Ecological Paradigm). The research encompassed 402 students of age 13-15. The results show that our respondents demonstrate a slight tendency towards pro-environmentalism. Three factors were obtained using factor analysis: Environmental Crisis, (Anti) anthropocentrism, and (Anti) exemptionalism. The difference between the boys and girls became manifest in the third factor. According to the research results, girls are more inclined to believe that people, regardless of their aptitude to develop science and technology, cannot be exempt from the natural environment and cannot influence natural processes. School achievement is in positive correlation with the Environmental Crisis factor. The research results indicate that decision-makers in education, researchers, and practitioners have to deal with a serious task - they have to find the ways how to increase the impact of the regular, everyday school life on students' attitudes towards the environment.

Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm

Higher education institutions are tasked with education for sustainable development, of which the environment is a central pillar. Understanding the demographic factors that influence the establishment of environmental worldviews allows educators to better contextualize sustainability content and discussion. Identifying pedagogies capable of creating learning spaces within which worldviews can shift offers similar opportunities. Using a quasi-experimental design and model building, this study identifies important social psychological antecedents of environmental beliefs, assesses the effectiveness of outbound mobility pedagogy at changing those beliefs and identifies important predictors of the nature and magnitude of those changes. Sustainable outbound mobility courses were effective at increasing environmental worldview compared to a control group. At program commencement, political orientation and business majors were negatively associated with environmental worldview, while female gender was the reverse. For sustainability education courses, only gender was retained as a significant predictor of the nature and change of environmental worldview by the course’s end. These results suggest that the factors associated with environmental worldview upon commencement of a course do not necessarily predict the malleability of that worldview in higher education students.

Assessing Children’s Environmental Worldviews and Concerns

The goal of the present research was to assess the environmental worldviews and concerns of students from the fourth to the seventh grade in Slovenia. The New Ecological Paradigm Scale for Children was translated and validated for use with Slovenian primary school students (N = 310). The students were also asked about their environmental concerns (using statements from the Environmental Motives Scale) and demographic questions. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted for the New Ecological Paradigm scale using AMOS software, confirming a three-dimensional model with ten items. The students showed the highest agreement with the items in the factor Rights of Nature, and the lowest agreement with Human Exemptionalism. The environmental attitudes of the students decreased from the fourth to the seventh grade, while altruistic environmental concerns significantly increased with higher grades. Gender differences were not statistically significant for environmental worldviews and concerns. The reported results show that biospheric environmental concern positively correlates with the factors Rights of Nature and belief in Eco-Crisis, and negatively correlates with Human Exemptionalism. The New Ecological Paradigm tool will enable the evaluation of education programmes for children in Slovenia.

Environmental worldviews of Serbian and Macedonian school students

The objectives of this study were to assess the dimensionality of the revised New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale in Serbian and Macedonian culture, and to use it to explore the environmental worldviews of young people in Serbia and the Republic of North Macedonia. A total of 850 pupils aged between 13 and 15 from 11 schools (5 elementary schools and 6 secondary schools) took part in this research. The dataset obtained from the scale was analysed via the principal component analysis factor extraction method, and a varimax rotation was applied. This study found all items load on four dimensions: Balance of Nature, Humans over Nature, Limits to Growth and Environmental Philosophy. Differences between subgroups occur in three out of four dimensions. The students’ environmental worldviews were determined by providing the frequency distribution of their responses. Both subgroups in the Republic of North Macedonia and Serbia are (slightly) environmentally conscious, with an ecological view of the environment. Macedonian school students have a slightly higher NEP score than their peers in Serbia, indicating more environmentally protective attitudes among them. The participants did not see the two paradigms as mutually exclusive, as do members of some industrialised societies. The rejection of the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) by the NEP is a phenomenon that could well only be present in Western societies, whereas in less industrialised societies, the NEP and DSP could coexist in a comprehensive environmental view. With minor alterations such as word substitutions to facilitate easy comprehension of items by the respondents, the revised NEP scale will show more universal applicability outside developed communities.