Abstract
Taking its primary interest in active environmental citizenship, this paper aims at evaluating a case of an educational intervention designed to foster environmental citizenship among undergraduate students at a technological university. The study employs a survey methodology implementing a recently validated environmental citizenship questionnaire. A randomized pre-group –post-group quasi-experimental survey design explores students’ environmental citizenship attributes before and after the intervention course, ‘Sustainable Development’, in comparison to students who participated in a general elective course, ‘Media Philosophy’. The results show that the participation in the intervention course induced positive change in students’ environmental citizenship in comparison to the control group. Additional analysis indicates that environmental citizenship is significantly related to environmental attitudes, nature experiences during childhood and adolescence, and gender. The article provides a timely contribution shedding light on how specific pedagogical approaches in higher education can foster environmental citizenship.
Highlights
This is linked to the order of the scales in the survey, and, reflects the increasing drop out as students progressed through the survey
In the context of education for sustainability, Rickenson et al [71] emphasize the importance of connecting the influences of educational interventions and what it is about the programs that are influential in creating these impacts
This study provides a response to this direction of study, which is still largely underexplored in the context of higher education [14], by investigating the influence of a unique course developed to target the characteristics of environmental citizenship via a holistic and multidisciplinary approach and implementing various teaching methods associated with developing competences and agency in the context of sustainability [26]
Summary
Environmental citizenship, as an idea and area of study, is situated within citizenship theory and reflects the understanding that active involvement in achieving the aspirations of sustainable development and promoting societies committed to sustainability is one of the responsibilities of the citizen. Corresponding with Barry’s [3] deep perspective of sustainability citizenship, the ENEC’s conceptualization of EC emphasizes the capacities and commitment for addressing the structural causes of environmental degradation [3,4]. All scales are 4-point Likert-type scales with the answer options ranked from 1—low to 4—high, except the scale ‘past actions’ (which has answer options ranked from high to low) For this reason, in the calculations of scale means, etc., the items of the past action scale were inverted
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