COS 196-2 - Transformative education for sustainability: Assessing transformation in the work of art, design, and architecture students.

Abstract: Education can do more than just provide students with knowledge: learning can transform student’s lives, shifting how they interact with the world. Such “transformative learning” occurs when students not only master key concepts but also apply those concepts in a way that shifts their own behaviors as future professionals and citizens. Nowhere is transformative learning more essential than in education for sustainability; if we wish to achieve a sustainable society, we need to educate students in ways that compel action. As providers of ecological and environmental science education to students whose primary educational pursuits are in the arts, design, and architecture – students whose future work will have a profound impact on the sustainability of our societies – we seek to understand how to produce transformational learning.

The concept of “transformative education for sustainability” (TEfS) – learning that leads students to take actions that contribute to sustainability efforts – has been explored by a number of education researchers, but we still do not have a robust understanding of how student learning experiences contribute to transformative learning. How can we detect transformative learning in non-majors? What kinds of ecology-themed educational experiences lead students to act on what they have learned in their general education sustainability courses? What kinds of ecological learning contribute to changes in how students live their lives?

A first challenge in determining what pedagogical approaches foster transformative learning is to develop protocols to detect TEfS outcomes in individual students. Towards this end, we apply a comprehensive rubric for assessing TEfS to a body of work produced by our art, design, and architecture students to detect transformative learning, demonstrating that gradations in TEfS outcomes can be detected in the work students produce. We employ student interviews and surveys to further explore the motivations behind student work, to understand potential behavioral changes beyond their academic work, and to identify preliminary factors that might explain why some students demonstrate more TEfS outcomes than others. We demonstrate that TEfS outcomes can be assessed using these methods, opening up the possibility of comprehensively studying what kinds of learning experiences in ecology-themed courses produce transformative learning.