J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35 DOI 10.1007/s13412-011-0007-2
Interdisciplinary environmental education: elements of field identity and curriculum design Shirley Vincent & Will Focht
Published online: 26 March 2011 # AESS 2011
Abstract Interdisciplinary environmental degree programs (environmental studies/science(s) and similar programs) in higher education in the U.S.A. are both diverse and dynamic in their curriculum designs. Though these characteristics afford flexibility and adaptability, they are also seen as weaknesses that can undermine programs’ perceived legitimacy both within and beyond their host institutions. The lack of a clear identity, definition of core competencies, and prescriptions for interdisciplinary pedagogy can create confusion among program stakeholders and skepticism among institutional administrators. To learn more about how interdisciplinary environmental curricula vary across the U.S.A., a national survey was conducted of program administrators to investigate their programs and identify their views of what an ideal curriculum would entail. The study demonstrates that consensus exists on field identity: an applied, interdisciplinary focus on the interface of coupled human-natural systems with a normative commitment to sustainability. The study also reveals that three ideal curricular models are espoused by these administrators: Systems Science, Policy and Governance, and Adaptive Management. Program attributes related to these models are also reported. We conclude the article with a brief description of how the three models are related to developing an interdisciplinary environmental workforce, describe the potential next steps for extending the study, and express our optimism that a consensus can be forged on core competencies guidelines and model-specific recomS. Vincent (*) National Council for Science and the Environment, Washington, DC, USA e-mail:
[email protected] W. Focht Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA
mendations for curricular content related to three broad knowledge areas and two skill sets. Keywords Interdisciplinary environmental education . Sustainability education . Environmental studies and science core competencies . Environmental studies and science field identity . Environmental studies and science curricula
In 2003, the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (NSF AC-ERE, established in 2000) released a 10-yearoutlook report for the National Science Foundation titled Complex Environmental Systems: Synthesis for Earth, Life and Society in the 21st Century. The report highlighted the interdependence of ecological health and human well-being and the complex environmental challenges posed by an expanding human global footprint. Because of the complex relationships among people, ecosystems, and the biosphere, human health and well-being are closely linked to the integrity of local, regional, and global ecosystems. Therefore, environmental research and education are central elements of local, national, and global security, health, and prosperity. (Pfirman and the AC-ERE 2003:1). The report stressed the importance of developing innovative interdisciplinary environmental (IE) research and educational approaches to train scientists, policymakers, and professionals in environmental synthesis—the merging of approaches and data across spatial, temporal, and societal scales to address multifaceted environmental issues. Subsequent AC-ERE reports—Complex Environmental Systems: Pathways to the Future (NSF AC-ERE 2005) and Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental
J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35
Systems (NSF AC-ERE 2009)—continue to underscore the urgency of the need to transform environmental higher education and research. The 2009 report urges a shift toward societal needs-driven education and research that focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the complex, adaptive interaction of social and natural systems. Concurrently with the NSF AC-ERE's call for the development and support of new interdisciplinary approaches to environmental education and research, student demand for IE education is also growing rapidly, reaching new heights in 2009–10. The escalating interest in environmental degree programs has been widely reported by the media including articles in the Newsweek-Kaplan College Guide, the Princeton Review, the New York Times, and USA Today. The growth in enrollment has been dramatic. The University of Michigan's Program in the Environment was initiated in 2003 with 35 students and today has over 500 students. The University of California at Los Angeles launched its Environmental Science program in 2006 with ten students and 3 years later has 221 majors. Salisbury University founded its Environmental Studies program in 2004 and today has 93 majors. This level of growth is not unique to these three programs; the majority of IE programs are experiencing expanding enrollments. A survey of 260 IE programs conducted by us in 2008 found that two thirds reported a growth trend from 2003 to 2008. In addition, many programs that reported their enrollments as steady during that period experienced a surge in student interest in the semesters following the survey. For example, Antioch University New England reports that applications for their Master of Science programs in Environmental Studies and Resource Management and Conservation are up 42% from 2009. Similarly, the University of Vermont reports that between 2008 and 2010 the number of environmental science and environmental studies majors grew 37% from 495 to 679, and the number of degrees awarded rose 48% from 98 to an estimated 145. Responding to this burgeoning student demand, universities and colleges have been initiating new IE degree programs. The 2008 survey revealed that two thirds of existing IE programs were created after 1991, and almost a quarter since 2000. The pace of the creation of new IE programs is remarkable. A 2009 study by the National Wildlife Federation—the State of the Campus Environment report (McIntosh et al. 2009)—found that the proportion of colleges and universities offering baccalaureate and graduate IE degrees jumped to 44% from the 40% identified by a 2008 census conducted by CEDD/NSCE (Vincent 2010a). In a recent 6-month period (May–September 2010), 13 new IE programs—six masters and seven baccalaureate programs—were announced.
15
Job opportunities for the graduates of IE programs are also rising rapidly. The United States Department of Labor (2010) predicts a 28% increase in the number of environmental scientist and specialist positions between 2008 and 2018, a growth rate much higher than most occupations. In 2008, environmental scientists and specialists held 85,900 jobs; an additional 6,200 jobs were held by environmental faculty. About 37% of environmental scientists and specialists are employed in state and local governments; 21% in management, scientific, and technical consulting services; 15% in architectural, engineering, and related services; and 7% in the Federal Government, primarily in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense. Job growth is expected to be strongest in private sector consulting firms, but job prospects are also especially favorable for environmental health positions in state and local governments. Other emerging opportunities for IE program graduates include environmental jobs in public administration (environmental planning, urban development), sustainability (private and public sector sustainability management, sustainable community development, international sustainable development), environmental management (private and public sector environmental management systems, water management, energy management, greenhouse gas accounting and management, materials and waste management) and natural resources management (watershed systems, ecosystems, costal and marine systems, land use planning). Environmental protection expertise and sustainability knowledge are increasingly applicable across a wide spectrum of jobs, creating demand for IE degree programs as well as minors, certificates, and professional continuing education programs. The 2008 Jobs and Environment Initiative study identified the size of the environmental protection industry as $394 billion/year and estimated the industry was responsible for the creation of 5.3 million jobs in 2005 distributed across all employment sectors (Bezdek et al. 2008). The Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD), an association of academic environmental program leaders, was established in 2000. The National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the scientific basis of environmental decision making, serves as the secretariat for the association. The primary goal of the CEDD is to improve the quality, stature, and effectiveness of academic environmental programs at colleges and universities (see www.ncseonline.org for more information). One of the key initiatives of the CEDD is to conduct research on IE programs to inform and facilitate discussions on curriculum design, field identity, and essential knowledge and skills for program graduates.
16
IE study is a virtually unbounded field, as exhibited in the wide variety of IE degree-granting programs. Shaped by the traditions, missions, and cultures of their host institutions as well as their participating faculty and other stakeholders, extensive variability is found in their education goals, curricular content, and locations within institutional hierarchies. Moreover, environmental programs, perhaps more than any other area in higher education, are constantly evolving to address emerging issues and prepare graduates for new careers. New programs are being established and existing programs change in response to shifting political and social environments, funding opportunities, and advances in technology and knowledge. A 2008 census of IE degree programs conducted by the CEDD/NCSE identified 840 programs offering 1,183 baccalaureate and graduate degrees located at 652 colleges and universities (Vincent 2010a). IE programs are offered in all 50 states, as well as Guam and Puerto Rico. A large proportion of IE degree programs, 44%, are named environmental science(s). Another 25% are named environmental studies. Degrees in environmental studies are awarded primarily at the baccalaureate level; only 3% of IE masters degrees and 1% of doctoral degrees are named environmental studies. The remaining 31% of IE degree program names and focus areas vary widely, and include: Urban and Environmental Policy (Tufts University), Environmental Systems and Society (University of California at Los Angeles), Environmental Dynamics (University of Arkansas), Earth Systems Science and Policy (California State University at Monterey Bay), Watershed Science (Utah State University), and Natural Resources and Decision Making (Purdue University). Many institutions have more than one IE program and/or offer more than one type of IE degree. For example, the Department of Environmental Science at Barnard College offers undergraduate degrees in Environmental Science and Environmental Policy, and Cornell University has three different IE programs offering degrees in Biology and Society, Natural Resources, and Science of Natural and Environmental Systems. Flexibility is a key attribute of IE degree programs. Most IE programs offer an array of specialization options that reflect the expertise of their faculty and the mission and geographical locations of their institutions. For example, California State University at Monterey Bay offers undergraduate degrees in Earth Systems Science and Policy with five specializations: Environmental Policy, Marine and Coastal Ecology, Watershed Systems, Science and Social Justice or Science Education. Many programs also allow students to design their own concentrations to match their specific goals and interests. The Environmental Study programs at the Evergreen State College and the Program
J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35
in the Environment at the University of Michigan are two examples. This flexibility and diversity represent both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities because program leaders can draw upon core strengths at each institution to develop IE programs that prepare graduates to address a multitude of environmental issues using a variety of approaches. Challenges because employers, students, and other important constituencies may not understand the competency gained by the graduates of IE programs and program leaders have to decide how to structure their programs in the face of rapid change and diverse approaches. The lack of consensus on IE field identity, core curriculum, and interdisciplinary pedagogy fuels criticism that IE programs lack rigor, sustains vigorous debate on program assessment, and contributes to confusion about the competence of graduates and the role of IE programs in higher education and society. In response to these concerns, and given the lack of empirical studies on IE program curriculum design, the CEDD/NCSE launched the first comprehensive study of IE programs in the United States. The purposes of the study were to enhance understanding of IE programs and explore the potential for reaching consensus on IE field identity and core competencies to help guide curriculum design and facilitate recognition of the field. Competence in higher education is often defined as achieving specified learning outcomes that include theoretical and practical understanding, cognitive abilities, and techniques relevant to a specific field of study. Defining learning goals are a required prerequisite for designing curricular content and structure and determining pedagogical methods for implementing effective educational programs. Learning outcomes can also be expressed in terms of core competencies. Defining core competency criteria for IE programs serves several purposes: (1) provides a guide for curriculum development and, in a broader sense, for the overall development of the IE field of study; (2) promotes recognition of the IE field and the expertise and qualifications of its graduates; (3) facilitates cooperation and communication among faculty from a wide range of disciplines (an important component for IE programs that often draw upon expertise across campuses); and (4) forms a potential basis for IE program assessment, professional licensure, and perhaps degree program certification/accreditation. In the context of this study, competency is defined as the knowledge and skills students should learn—what concepts, problem-solving strategies and abilities they should acquire in their course of study. It does not include personal and social competencies which may also be considered important educational goals for IE programs. Our concept of competence is not narrowly defined vocational training
J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35
or skills acquisition, but rather the development of holistic understanding and abilities that are flexible and adaptable and that foster reflexive life-long learning. A competence approach for IE education must prepare students to creatively address problems in different contexts, continuously reflect upon their own perspectives and practices, and adapt to rapidly changing contemporary societies where narrowly defined traditional competencies may quickly become obsolete. This article presents the key findings from the CEDD/ NCSE study. These include agreement among program leaders on key characteristics that form the identity of the field of IE education, common curricular elements that form a framework for understanding IE program curriculum design, and three distinct but complementary broad ideal approaches to IE education. The study was conducted in two phases; the findings of the first phase have been previously published (Vincent and Focht 2009; Vincent and Focht 2010) and are only briefly reviewed in this article. The remainder of the article focuses on key findings from the second phase of the study which analyzed data from a comprehensive national survey of IE programs.
Research design The CEDD/NCSE IE programs study addressed four broad research questions designed to inform and facilitate discussion on IE program field identity and essential knowledge and skills: 1. What are the perspectives among IE program leaders regarding curriculum design? What do they have in common and how do they differ? (phase I) 2. What dimensions underlie the inclusion of various knowledge and skill areas in IE program curricula? How are these areas related and how may they be combined into interdisciplinary knowledge and skills areas? (phase II) 3. What types of ideal models of IE program curricula exist? What are the characteristics of each model? (phase II) 4. How are administrative and degree program attributes related to ideal curriculum types? What do these relationships indicate concerning program structure and evolution? (phase II) Phase I—perspectives on interdisciplinary environmental program curricula The first phase of the curriculum study sought to answer the first research question about the number of perspectives on environmental program curriculum design that program
17
administrators hold, how the perspectives differ, and what they have in common. This phase of the study was conducted in 2003 with 61 volunteer participants from the CEDD membership who identified themselves as administrators of IE programs. The study used Q methodology to discern the various perspectives regarding environmental program curriculum design held by the administrators. Q methodology is widely used as a research tool for empirically determining the perspectives of participants in a variety of policy development and decision-making processes. It can be used to identify various viewpoints and perceptions about a particular situation, provide insight into the attributes of each perspective, explicitly outline areas of consensus and conflict, and assist in developing a common view. See Vincent and Focht (2009) and Vincent (2010b) for details on the methodology used in this phase of the study. Phase II—national survey of interdisciplinary environmental programs The second phase of the curriculum study was designed to answer the remaining three research questions: (1) the identity of the dimensions that underlie the inclusion of knowledge and skill areas in IE program curricula, (2) the number and characteristics of ideal curricular models for IE education; and (3) how administrative and degree program attributes may be related to the ideal curriculum types and what these relationships indicate concerning program structure and evolution. This phase of the study was based on a 2008 comprehensive survey that elicited responses from a nationally representative sample of IE program administrators representing 260 programs awarding 343 IE degrees. Program administrators were targeted because not only were they expected to be most familiar with their programs but also because fewer than half of these programs have their own appointed faculty. The webbased questionnaire included four broad groups of questions: institution information, program administrator information, administrative program information, and degree program information. Survey population The survey was limited to U.S. baccalaureate and graduate IE degree-granting programs that focus on human and natural systems from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. This population included all degree programs named environmental science(s) or environmental studies as well as degree programs with other names such as sustainability, environmental policy, environmental management, and natural resources management. Programs that offer only associate degrees, minors/certificates, and degrees in allied or professional fields were not included. Excluded
18
programs include professional programs such as environmental engineering, environmental law, and environmental health and safety, and discipline-oriented programs in allied fields such as environmental chemistry, environmental geology, conservation biology, sustainable agriculture, forestry management, environmental economics, and environmental statistics. Altogether, 840 IE programs at 652 institutions awarding 1,183 degrees were identified that met the selection criteria. Survey response Completed survey responses were received from administrators of 260 of the 840 programs identified (including information on 343 degrees)—a response rate of 31%. This sample was sufficient to measure correlations between attributes with a power of 0.90 to detect a 0.20 effect size at α=0.05 (a low-moderate effect); statistical frequencies have a margin of error of ±5%. The representativeness of the sample was assessed by comparing four defining program attributes between the sample and target population at α=0.05: institution basic Carnegie class, institution control (public or private-not-forprofit), institution location (U.S. census division), and degree types (name/degree level). No significant differences were found between the sample and population concerning institutional control type or census region. Similarly, no significant differences in institutional basic Carnegie classes were found, with the single exception of an overrepresentation of doctoral institutions with very high research activity (these institutions are much more likely to have IE programs than other institutional types). With respect to degree types, no significant differences were found except for an under-representation of graduate environmental science(s) degree programs and overrepresentation of environmental studies masters-level degree programs. We conclude from these results that our sample is sufficiently representative of the population to justify the generalization of our findings to IE programs nationwide.
Analytic methodology Several statistical methods were employed to analyze the survey results. First, answers to all questions were screened and coded for statistical analysis (responses to open-ended questions were coded according to emergent themes) and descriptive statistics calculated using measures appropriate for each question's data. Subsequently three types of statistical analyses were conducted to address the three research questions: (1) exploratory factor analysis to determine the dimensions of knowledge and skills in ideal IE program curricula, (2) cluster analysis to determine the number and characteristics of ideal IE curriculum models,
J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35
and (3) analyses of variance to determine relationships between IE program attributes and the ideal curriculum models. Exploratory factor analysis Factor analysis reduces a number of interrelated variables to a smaller number of dimensions or factors, each representing a common entity or construct, thus revealing how responses are related and enhancing understanding of relationships between variables. The data subjected to factor analysis was IE program administrators' judgments of the importance of 16 knowledge areas and 23 skills in an ideal curriculum for each degree their program offered (using a four-point Likert scale—minimal, low, moderate, high). The knowledge and skills variables included were vetted by IE program administrators prior to the survey and a total of 304 knowledge sets and 308 skills sets were obtained for analysis. Maximum likelihood factor extraction was chosen because it includes a statistical goodness-of-fit test and allows generalizations from an unbiased sample to a population of subjects. In this case, the factors reveal how various areas of knowledge and skills are combined into interdisciplinary components and the factor models how these components are related to each other in idealized IE program curricula. Thus, the factors represent broad interdisciplinary core competency areas and the factor models’ structure provides understanding of how these components are generally related in an ideal IE curriculum structure. Five criteria can be considered when determining the number of factors to retain for interpretation. All five criteria were evaluated; the popular Kaiser criterion was selected, which recommends retaining all factors with eigenvalues≥1. The meaning of each factor is interpreted using factor loadings. A factor loading is the Pearson correlation coefficient of the original variables (in this study, the importance ratings of knowledge and skill areas) with a factor. Factor loadings indicate an association of the variable with a factor and ranges from 1 (perfect positive association) to −1 (perfect negative association). In social science research, 0.32 is cited as a conservative value for the minimum loading of a variable on a factor because it equates to approximately 10% overlapping variance. This value was used as the critical value for this study. The relative importance of each variable for explaining a factor is indicated by the magnitude of the squares of the factor loadings. Factor rotation is used to simplify data structures by rotating factor axes so that the variables are loaded maximally on only one factor (minimizes unexplained variance). Orthogonal rotation maintains factor independence while oblique rotation allows factors to correlate. Oblique rotation should be used if factors are believed to be
J Environ Stud Sci (2011) 1:14–35
related. Since it was suspected that some factors would be related, an oblique (Promax) rotation method was chosen. Cluster analysis Cluster analysis is used to combine or classify objects into groups that exhibit high internal (within cluster) homogeneity and high external (betweencluster) heterogeneity. Cluster analysis was used to identify groups of program administrators who rated the importance of the knowledge and skills variables similarly, thus representing different ideal educational approaches/curriculum models for IE programs. The analysis was conducted on principal component scores using the SPSS two-step clustering method. Principle component scores were analyzed instead of the original 39 importance ratings because in cluster analysis multicollinearity results in a weighting process that affects the analysis; multicollinear variables are implicitly weighted more heavily. Since several of the importance-rated variables exhibited multicollinearity, principal components analysis was used to group related variables prior to clustering. Reducing the original importance rating variables into sets of knowledge and skill components eliminated multicollinearity while retaining all variables and their variances in the analysis. Analysis of variance Finally, two types of analysis of variance tests (α
