Full Description
Learner-centered teaching is a
pedagogical approach that emphasizes the roles of students as participants in
and drivers of their own learning. Learner-centered teaching activities go
beyond traditional lecturing by helping students construct their own
understanding of information, develop skills via hands-on engagement, and
encourage personal reflection through metacognitive tasks. In addition,
learner-centered classroom approaches may challenge students' preconceived
notions and expand their thinking by confronting them with thought-provoking
statements, tasks or scenarios that cause them to pay closer attention and
cognitively "see" a topic from new perspectives. Many types of pedagogy fall
under the umbrella of learner-centered teaching including laboratory work,
group discussions, service and project-based learning, and student-led
research, among others. Unfortunately, it is often not possible to use some of
these valuable methods in all course situations given constraints ofmoney,
space, instructor expertise, class-meeting and instructor preparation time, and
the availability of prepared lesson plans and material. Thus, a major challenge
for many instructors is how to integrate learner-centered activities widely
into their courses.
The broad goal of this volume is to help
advance environmental education practices that help increase students'
environmental literacy. Having a diverse collection of learner-centered
teaching activities is especially useful for helping students develop their
environmental literacy because such approaches can help them connect more
personally with the material thus increasing the chances for altering the
affective and behavioral dimensions of their environmental literacy. This
volume differentiates itself from others by providing a unique and diverse
collection of classroom activities that can help students develop their
knowledge, skills and personal views about many contemporary environmental and
sustainability issues.
Contents
Introduction.- Which is Most Sustainable? Using Everyday Objects to Examine Trade-offs
among the "Three Pillars" of Sustainability.- An Introduction to Systems
Thinking using Plastic Dinosaurs.- An Introductory Examination of Worldviews
and Why They Matter For Environmental and Sustainability Studies.- Building
Resilience: Modeling Resilience Concepts Using Legos.- Eco-Crimes and
Eco-Redemptions: Discussing the Challenges and Opportunities of Personal Sustainability.-
Engaging with Complexity: Exploring the Terrain of Leadership for
Sustainability.- Discovering Authentic Hope: Helping Students Reflect on
Learning and Living with Purpose.- Teaching How Scientific Consensus is
Developed through Simplified Meta-analysis of Peer-reviewed Literature.- Understanding
Ecosystems and Their Services through Apollo 13 and Bottle Models.- Using Soil
Organisms to Explore Ecosystem Functioning, Services, and Sustainability.- Fire,
Pollution and Grazing, Oh My! A Game in which Native and Invasive Plants
Compete under Multiple Disturbance Regimes.- Exploring Trophic Cascades in Lake
Food Webs with a Spreadsheet Model.- Ants, Elephants, and Experimental Design:
Understanding Science and Examining Connections between Species Interactions
and Ecosystem Processes.- Teaching Lyme Disease Ecology Through a
Primary-Literature Jigsaw Activity.- A Fisheries Activity to Examine the
Tragedy of the Common Goldfish Cracker.- Making Biodiversity Stewardship
Tangible using a Place-based Approach.- Conservation Triage: Debating Which
Species to Save and Why.- Everything Cannot Be Equal: Ranking Priorities and
Revealing Worldviews to Guide Watershed Management.- Location, Location,
Location! Analyzing Residential Development in Environmentally-Fragile Areas.- Tasting
Sustainability: Using Multi-sensory Activities to Retune Food Preferences.- Relationships
between Consumption and Sustainability: Assessing the Effect of Life Cycle
Costs on Market Price.- Business Sustainability and the Triple Bottom Line:
Considering the Interrelationships of People, Profit, and Planet.- A
Triple-Bottom-Line Analysis of Energy Efficient Lighting.- Go with the Flow:
Analyzing Energy Use and Efficiency in the U.S.- Exploring Complexities of
Energy Options through a Jigsaw Activity.- Introducing the Conflicting Meanings
of "Justice" Using a Candy-distribution Exercise.- Beyond Band-Aids: Using
Systems Thinking to Assess Environmental Justice.- Engaging the Empathic
Imagination to Explore Environmental Justice.- Helping Students Envision
Justice in the Sustainable City.- Social-ecological Systems Mapping to Enhance
Students' Understanding of Community-Scale Conflicts Related to Industrial
Pollution.- The Skies, the Limits: Assessing the Benefits and Drawbacks of
Tighter U.S. Soot Emission Standards.- Don't Blame the Trees: Using Data to
Examine how Trees Contribute to Air Pollution.- Evaluating the Effectiveness of
Green Roofs: A Case Study for Literature Research and Critical Thinking.- The
Story of Source Reliability: Practicing Research and Evaluation Skills Using
"The Story of Stuff" Video.- Critically Evaluating Non-scholarly Sources
through Team-Based Learning.- Using the Insights, Questions and Challenges
(IQC) Framework to Improve Students' Environmental Communication Skills.- Building
Students' Communication Skills and Understanding of Environmental and
Sustainability Issues Interactively and Cumulatively with Pecha Kucha
Presentations.- Engaging in Climate Change Conversations: A Role-Playing
Exercise to Cultivate Effective Communication.- Writing Letters to the Editor
to Promote Environmental Citizenship and Improve Student Writing.- Captioning
Political Cartoons from Different Perspectives as a Tool for Student Reflection.-
Analyzing Nature as a Persuasive Tool in Advertisements.- Making and Assessing
Art in the Sustainability Classroom.
