New Leaf Talk of interest Thurs, 2/8 at 3:30p

[Tim Zimmerman]

details:

*CS Talk Thursday, /_February 8th in the ASH Auditorium at 3:30_/*

Please join us for this talk, given by a candidate for the Jonathan Lash 
Endowed Chair of Environmental Education.

Dr. Aaron Strong, Assistant Professor of Marine Policy at the University 
of Maine

Environmental learning and environmental behavior in the Anthropocene: 
Advancing sustainability practice through community-engagement and 
decision-support tools

As the effects of climate change become manifest, the decisions being 
made now – by organizations, by governments and by individuals – about 
how we attribute and assess climate risk and climate responsibility and 
about how we develop, frame and teach sustainability curricula, have 
enormous implications for whether proposed solutions will ultimately 
advance sustainability and climate justice or impede it. Here, I present 
two qualitative empirical studies which examine the factors that create 
successful linkages between experience, learning and pro-environmental 
behaviors. Within these two studies,  and in all of my work, I seek to 
become a part of the solution-space to the challenges of global 
environmental change through participatory action research that 
normatively seeks to advance sustainability through the uptake of 
pro-environmental behaviors across decision-making scales. First, the 
last decade has witnessed a large-scale proliferation of the use of 
decision support tools, billed as ‘boundary-spanning’ objects that can 
help decision-makers, individuals, communities, or policy-makers 
visualize and trust information about the changing environment and 
evaluate trade-offs in decision-making. Decision-support tools, such as 
interactive climate risk maps and carbon footprint calculators, are 
frequently being coupled with participatory structured decision-making 
processes to enhance the credibility and legitimacy of sustainability 
decisions. Here, through a series of two cases, I present qualitative 
data that I use to examine the factors that lead conservation 
organizations, community-organizers, and individual resource users to 
adopt the use these tools. I also explore the barriers and equity issues 
that arise in the deployment of these processes with the goal of 
informing participatory sustainability practice. Second, I present 
evidence for the effects of community-engaged learning in shaping 
student internal narratives about how environmental scientific 
information can support sustainability practices in community- and 
place-based environmental contexts, and discuss ideas for scaling up 
these insights through the development of a novel and broad 
sustainability leadership curriculum in higher education. Collectively, 
these studies are designed to provide insights into how our rapidly 
developing sustainability practices in education and community 
engagement can be improved to continue to advance sustainability and 
justice in the Anthropocene.




-- 
Timothy D. Zimmerman
Visiting Assistant Professor of Cognition and Education
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
p - 413-559-6621
w - https://www.hampshire.edu/faculty/timothy-zimmerman and http://sites.hampshire.edu/tzimmerman/
e - tzimmerman at hampshire.edu

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