Learner-Centered Teaching Activities for Environmental and Sustainability Studies -

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Résumé :
Learner-centered teaching is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the roles of students as participants in and drivers of their own learning. Learner-centered teaching activities go beyond traditional lecturing by helping students construct their own understanding of information, develop skills via hands-on engagement, and encourage personal reflection through metacognitive tasks. In addition, learner-centered classroom approaches may challenge students' preconceived notions and expand their thinking by confronting them with thought-provoking statements, tasks or scenarios that cause them to pay closer attention and cognitively see a topic from new perspectives. Many types of pedagogy fall under the umbrella of learner-centered teaching including laboratory work, group discussions, service and project-based learning, and student-led research, among others. Unfortunately, it is often not possible to use some of these valuable methods in all course situations given constraints ofmoney, space, instructor expertise, class-meeting and instructor preparation time, and the availability of prepared lesson plans and material. Thus, a major challenge for many instructors is how to integrate learner-centered activities widely into their courses. The broad goal of this volume is to help advance environmental education practices that help increase students' environmental literacy. Having a diverse collection of learner-centered teaching activities is especially useful for helping students develop their environmental literacy because such approaches can help them connect more personally with the material thus increasing the chances for altering the affective and behavioral dimensions of their environmental literacy. This volume differentiates itself from others by providing a unique and diverse collection of classroom activities that can help students develop their knowledge, skills and personal views about many contemporary environmental and sustainability issues. ? ? ?...

Biographie:
Dr. Loren Byrne is an Associate Professor of Biology & Environmental Science and served as the first Coordinator of the Sustainability Studies Program at Roger Williams University.

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Sommaire:
Introduction.- Which is Most Sustainable?? Using Everyday Objects to Examine Trade-offs among the Three Pillars of Sustainability.- An Introduction to Systems Thinking using Plastic Dinosaurs.- An Introductory Examination of Worldviews and Why They Matter For Environmental and Sustainability Studies.- Building Resilience: Modeling Resilience Concepts Using Legos.- Eco-Crimes and Eco-Redemptions: Discussing the Challenges and Opportunities of Personal Sustainability.- Engaging with Complexity: Exploring the Terrain of Leadership for Sustainability.- Discovering Authentic Hope: Helping Students Reflect on Learning and Living with Purpose.- Teaching How Scientific Consensus is Developed through Simplified Meta-analysis of Peer-reviewed Literature.- Understanding Ecosystems and Their Services through Apollo 13 and Bottle Models.- Using Soil Organisms to Explore Ecosystem Functioning, Services, and Sustainability.- Fire, Pollution and Grazing, Oh My! A Game in which Native and Invasive Plants Compete under Multiple Disturbance Regimes.- Exploring Trophic Cascades in Lake Food Webs with a Spreadsheet Model.- Ants, Elephants, and Experimental Design: Understanding Science and Examining Connections between Species Interactions and Ecosystem Processes.- Teaching Lyme Disease Ecology Through a Primary-Literature Jigsaw Activity.- A Fisheries Activity to Examine the Tragedy of the Common Goldfish Cracker.- Making Biodiversity Stewardship Tangible using a Place-based Approach.- Conservation Triage: Debating Which Species to Save and Why.- Everything Cannot Be Equal: Ranking Priorities and Revealing Worldviews to Guide Watershed Management.- Location, Location, Location! Analyzing Residential Development in Environmentally-Fragile Areas.- Tasting Sustainability: Using Multi-sensory Activities to Retune Food Preferences.- Relationships between Consumption and Sustainability: Assessing the Effect of Life Cycle Costs on Market Price.- Business Sustainability and the Triple Bottom Line: Considering the Interrelationships of People, Profit, and Planet.- A Triple-Bottom-Line Analysis of Energy Efficient Lighting.- Go with the Flow: Analyzing Energy Use and Efficiency in the U.S.- Exploring Complexities of Energy Options through a Jigsaw Activity.- Introducing the Conflicting Meanings of Justice Using a Candy-distribution Exercise.- Beyond Band-Aids: Using Systems Thinking to Assess Environmental Justice.- Engaging the Empathic Imagination to Explore Environmental Justice.- Helping Students Envision Justice in the Sustainable City.- Social-ecological Systems Mapping to Enhance Students' Understanding of Community-Scale Conflicts Related to Industrial Pollution.- The Skies, the Limits: Assessing the Benefits and Drawbacks of Tighter U.S. Soot Emission Standards.- Don't Blame the Trees: Using Data to Examine how Trees Contribute to Air Pollution.- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Green Roofs: A Case Study for Literature Research and Critical Thinking.- The Story of Source Reliability: Practicing Research and Evaluation Skills Using The Story of Stuff Video.- Critically Evaluating Non-scholarly Sources through Team-Based Learning.- Using the Insights, Questions and Challenges (IQC) Framework to Improve Students' Environmental Communication Skills.- Building Students' Communication Skills and Understanding of Environmental and Sustainability Issues Interactively and Cumulatively with Pecha Kucha Presentations.- Engaging in Climate Change Conversations: A Role-Playing Exercise to Cultivate Effective Communication.- Writing Letters to the Editor to Promote Environmental Citizenship and Improve Student Writing.- Captioning Political Cartoons from Different Perspectives as a Tool for Student Reflection.- Analyzing Nature as a Persuasive Tool in Advertisements...