One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading!
The German NGO “Streitgut” recently posted a youtube video with a reference to an article on how activating different identities influences willingness to help, that I then had to check out because we are working so much with belonging and ingroup/outgroup issues right now. My summary of that article below:
One part of co-creation — letting students create learning content for each other — has always been fascinating to me. The idea is that in order to create meaningful materials for others, they have to develop a good grasp of the material themselves, figure out a sequence, fill any gaps in prior knowledge, etc.. Also the materials that are being produced might feel more relevant to peers because they come from their own peer group, might be more current in the way they are presented, … But how well does content co-creation actually work to support learning?
After all the thinking about belonging I’ve done recently, I came across the article by Janke et al. (2017) today that measures “social identification with academia” as Venn-diagram with varying degrees of overlap of the circles for “self” and “academics”, which I thought was neat. The reason I found the article was because I was looking for the connection between generation in college and test anxiety, which they investigate. The idea is that for continuing-generation students, i.e. students who have at least one parent who has gone to university, it is much easier to identify with academia and to take failure as something normal that they can overcome, and not as a sign of failure and not belonging. They find that this acts as a buffer for negative experiences, so continuing-generation students can feel more satisfied and less test-anxious in the face of failure (both of which likely makes it easier to succeed again). The academic disadvantage that first-generation students have is therefore not just about not knowing the hidden curriculum and untold rules (as well as typically growing up with less resources (I once read that the number of books in the household a child grows up in is a good predictor for their academic career — how horrible is that?)), but also about their social identity that doesn’t help them feel like belong but that makes belonging depend on how well they do and therefore adds a lot of stress.
I don’t know if there are easy interventions to fix this issue, but it’s at least important to be aware that academic privilege of continuing-generation students is even larger than previously assumed, and to keep this in mind going forward.
Janke S, Rudert SC, Marksteiner T and Dickhäuser O (2017) Knowing One’s Place: Parental Educational Background Influences Social Identification with Academia, Test Anxiety, and Satisfaction with Studying at University. Front. Psychol. 8:1326. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01326
Yesterday morning, we had a very interesting “teaching breakfast” as part of #CoCreatingGFI: Anja Møgelvang introduced us to Cooperative Learning. Anja is a PhD student at the Center for Excellence in Biology teaching BioCEED, and in addition has 15 years of experience in high school teaching, and 5 in teacher education, so who better suited to talk about this?
Cooperative Learning (CL) is a highly structured method (and not to be confused with the much less structured collaborative learning) – the teacher sets very clear rules around how groups form, how students work together in groups, how tasks are structured and shared. The goal is to create “positive interdependence”, i.e. structuring groups and tasks in such a way that students depend on each other in order to complete the assignments, and on “individual accountability”, i.e. making sure that there is no social loafing.
Welcome to another #WaveWatchingWednesday!
As we are continuing working on our “sense of belonging” project at UiB (read more about my thoughts on students’ sense of belonging and what we can do about it here; and the general idea behind this project is to first get a baseline of student experiences, and then figure out how to make all students feel welcome and that they are in the right place), I’ve started reading up on “mattering”. Belonging makes the assumption that students want to belong in the first place, and that’s not necessarily the case. Mattering, on the other hand, is only about how students perceive others’ reactions to themselves.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to many people that are in one way or other involved in teaching about sustainability at high school or university level. One thing that has struck me is how many seem to be teaching about sustainability without actually believing that we can and will “fix” the big issues like climate, biodiversity, hunger, wars. And while I don’t have a solution to them either, I found it so disheartening to see all these teachers that talk to so many young people and that seem to have no hope for the future. Surely this cannot be the way to do things. If they don’t see the point of changing things because we are all doomed anyway, how will they support their students to develop skills and strategies to deal with all the big challenges they will be faced with?
This is where the article I’m summing up below comes in:
Yesterday, in our “collegial project course: teaching sustainability”, I showed two models of how one might approach thinking about teaching sustainability, and here is another one that I quite like, from the article
Welcome to another #WaveWatchingWednesday!