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"All of the Above?" Confusion and Disempowerment Among Change-Seeking ESS Undergraduate Students
Type of Session
Poster Presentation
Abstract
In this research poster, we present some of the results of a multi-year survey of U.S. undergraduate students enrolled in environmental studies and science (ESS) courses. The 31-item survey (at https://tinyurl.com/ess-socialchange) was completed by more than 1200 students from 71 randomly selected ESS programs catalogued by the National Council of Science and Environment. It inquires about students' understanding of and attitudes toward social change, and assesses their perspectives on topics ranging from the effectiveness of green consumption to the role of education, policies, value-change, and crisis in driving environmental change.
Work presented in this poster contributes to the literature on student empowerment within ESS programs, which we briefly summarize before focusing on three tasks: (i) we describe the outline and context of and motivation for our multi-year survey, (ii) we point to several stark confusions and contradictions in ESS student understanding of social change and environmental action that emerge from our sample, and (iii) we speculate, from our position as advanced ESS undergraduate students (Chee and Kaur) and an ESS professor (Maniates), why such confusion and contradiction exist, and explore the implications for ESS programs that seek to drive meaningful change.
In particular, we highlight the unexpectedly deep extent to which ESS students in our sample treat contradictory approaches to environmental problem-solving as complementary and necessary -- an "all of the above/anything goes" approach to social change, in other words. We illustrate how students appear to find this hyper-inclusivity unsatisfying, and suggest this as evidence of trained incapacity within ESS students to think strategically about environment-related social change. While an understanding of diverse approaches to addressing environmental issues is valuable, we conclude that students require a more comprehensive ESS education that encourages reflexivity and helps them grapple with the incompatibilities of contradictory theories and/or solutions to environmental problems.