2018 Conference

Poster Presentation

Given the complex sustainability challenges facing our world, higher education has been deemed a promising site for equipping future citizens to meet the demands of cultivating a more sustainably engaged citizenry. Higher education contributes to the sustainability forefront through educating students about sustainability, the process of providing them with the information, skills, and tools to increase their knowledge, values, and behaviors that contribute to society’s progress towards sustainability. Sustainability subject matter is different from traditional disciplinary subject matter (such as mathematics or literature), as it can be highly politicized, culturally sensitive and potentially catastrophic. As such, in order to explore how to teach sustainability subject matter to higher education students well, I engaged in an in-depth literature review, and created the Framework for Teaching and Learning for Sustainability in Higher Education. In this framework, I posit that sustainability outcomes will be influenced by students’ access to sustainability content (opportunity to learn) as well as the ways in which they learn this content (promising practices of teaching and learning). To test this framework, I used structural equation modeling on a sample of 700 students who filled out a pre- and post- test at the beginning and end of the fall 2017 semester. I use structural equation modeling to exmine if opportunity to learn, cognitively responsive teaching, and teaching for sustainability influence learning outcomes. Next, I will test whether this framework holds in one public, large-sized, four-year institution. Structural equation modeling is advantageous to the present study because: it is a confirmatory method that allows for testing of a posited model (both the measurement model and the predictive model); it provides the ability to confirm theoretically driven, hypothetical relationships; and it allows for the study of multiple endogenous variable. The poster will provide figures of the framework, and explain the models, and reveal findings about how to teach sustainability to higher education students.