New Leaf Sustainable urban farming in India - CS lunch talk 4/4

[Sarah Partan]

CS WEDNESDAY LUNCH TALK, April 4th in the ASH Lobby at Noon

Deborah Dutta, PhD student in Science Education at the Homi Bhabha 
Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 
Mumbai, India

Title: Motivating actions towards a sustainable future: An urban farming 
case study

Abstract: The role of human actions in environmental destruction is now 
widely acknowledged. However, promoting environment-oriented actions has 
turned out to be a complex mandate, due to the interplay of various 
factors, such as socio-cultural context, locus-of-control, the role of 
affect and cognitive load. This problem has led to a corporeal turn in 
the environmental education literature, where pedagogical interventions 
are moving away from information-based environmental education, to focus 
instead on 'action-competence'. These approaches argue for the primacy 
of sensory experiences in 're-animating' the environment (Bai, 2009), 
thereby fostering deeper connections that are unavailable through 
abstract conceptions of nature.  Environmental actions can be seen as 
stemming from instances of enchantment (Bennett, 2010) that form the 
basis for developing relationships and narratives with salient entities 
(such as the growth of plants). To understand this approach to 
environmental education, we did a study, based on an urban-farming 
project with 40 students, aged 12-13 years old, for a period of 10 
months. We took an analysis approach inspired by recent work 
highlighting the affective-aesthetic appeal of environmental entities, 
as well as embodied cognition models, examining students' interaction 
with environmental entities closely. Based on this data, we propose that 
non-representational, meaningful encounters with nature, based on 
participation, contribute to enhancing students' environmental 
'action-space'. This space is shared by the community of student 
farmers, and acts as motivation for 'ripple' actions at a community level.

Bio: Deborah Dutta is a PhD student in Science Education at the Homi 
Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental 
Research, Mumbai, India. Her thesis work focuses on developing 
community-practice based interventions (such as urban farming) to 
motivate environment-oriented behaviour. The long-term objective of this 
project is to develop policy recommendations that could help redesign 
the environmental education curriculum in India in an action-oriented 
fashion, where similar community-practices could help motivate students 
towards an environmentally responsible culture.

In The ASH Lobby
A light lunch will be available at noon


-- 
Katie Stiefel
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
Phone: 413.559.5502
Fax: 413.559.5438