Senior Laboratory Instructor Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts, United States
Session Description: Traditional ecological education emphasizes facts, theories, and scientific skill development. Though essential, such emphasis alone may not help many students personally connect with nature, ecology, and their benefits for humanity. This is especially true for students without pre-existing connections because of increased time spent indoors, lack of access to the outdoors, no prior ecology education, competing interests, and other factors. Such students may feel that they don’t “belong” in or can’t succeed in science courses. Even students who otherwise appreciate learning about ecological concepts may be uninterested in them in context of “dry, boring” science courses. Such student backgrounds and perspectives can be barriers to achieving the goal of helping all students improve their ecological literacy. In response, ecological educators should consider a wider range of topics and teaching methods beyond those traditionally used in science education to “hook” students’ attention. This will also help advance diversity, equity, and inclusion goals by helping more students feel connected to ecology and possibly pursue ecology careers.
One way to connect more diverse student populations to ecology is to engage them in studying ecology as whole people, which includes consideration of their emotions, beliefs, experiences, and personal interests. Providing opportunities for students to reflect on and discuss these affective variables can increase their sense of belonging in science classes, and may cause some to reconsider their relationships to nature and ecology. Further, integrating such issues into ecology classes enables instructors to help students connect ecology to other topics such as psychology, health, politics, and ethics, thus deepening their interdisciplinary knowledge and making ecology more relevant to students pursuing diverse majors.
The suggestion to include affective issues in ecology teaching is likely to generate questions, excitement, uncertainty, and possibly discomfort among educators. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss the many considerations and challenges of “affective ecological education.” Through brief presentations, breakout group brainstorming sessions and whole-group discussion, participants will draft teaching objectives and activities for helping students reflect on and discuss their connections to nature, science and ecology. The ESA’s 4-Dimensional Ecology Education Framework will be used to inspire brainstorming because its inclusion of interdisciplinary human-environment connections relates well to integrating issues that necessitate consideration of students’ personal views, backgrounds, and interests. After the workshop, participants will have new perspectives and abilities to help diverse student populations develop deeper ecological literacy through multiple scientific and affective paths.
