Education Commons^™

Portfolio For Soci 346: Environmental Sociology, Gwendwr Meredith

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Environmental sociology, SOCI 346, is the study of how social systems interact with ecosystems. As such, it is a very broad course that is tasked with understanding complex and often controversial questions about the social causes, consequences, and responses to environmental disruption. In this teaching portfolio, I enumerate how I use a backward design for crafting assessments that cater to my specific teaching goals and learning objectives for the course. In the first stage of this process, I reflected on what learning outcomes I wished to achieve and determined that structuring the course in modules aligned with the learning objectives …

Making Open Scholarship More Equitable And Inclusive, Paul L. Arthur, Lydia Hearn, John C. Ryan, Nirmala Menon, Langa Khumalo

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Democratizing access to information is an enabler for our digital future. It can transform how knowledge is created, preserved, and shared, and strengthen the connection between academics and the communities they serve. Yet, open scholarship is influenced by history and politics. This article explores the foundations underlying open scholarship as a quest for more just, equitable, and inclusive societies. It analyzes the origins of the open scholarship movement and explores how systemic factors have impacted equality and equity of knowledge access and production according to location, nationality, race, age, gender, and socio-economic circumstances. It highlights how the privileges of the …

Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, And Possible Futures, Petar Jandrić, Derek R. Ford

Education Studies Faculty publications

This paper charts some genealogies, challenges, and directions for experimenting with the utopic postdigital ecopedagogies demanded by our present (post)pandemic reality. These are messianic—rather than prophetic—utopias that exist not as proclamations or programmes for a distant future but as potentialities immanent in the irreducible excess of the present. While their roots most clearly emanate from the Freirean-inspired ecopedagogy movement, we conceptualize ecopedagogies instead as educational forms that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems from and to which we write and think. These are expansive ecosystems of humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, …

Sprouting Systems, Abaigeal Aydt, Cassidy Smith

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

After taking a class at UNL about environmental awareness, two honors students paired up to start a hydroponics club at a local Lincoln school. In reaching out to the LPS director of sustainability, they were paired up with Prescott Elementary School. Over the course of a semester, they developed a club that got a hydroponic grow tower functioning for the school and taught students about nutrition and sustainability. This club is only in its beginning stages, but the impacts that it is making around the school can already be seen.

Law School News: Staff Person Of The Year 2021: Ann Marie Thompson 05/18/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Scaffolding High-Impact Practices For Asian Studies And The Environment, Brett Werner, Kyle Anderson, Matthew Klooster, Daniel Kirchner, Aaron Godlaski

Lewis Honors College Faculty Publications

Support from the Henry Luce Foundation allowed a team of Centre College faculty to develop multiple integrated programs connecting the study of Asia to the environment: the Centre Summer Language Institute (CSLI), the Asia & the Environment Lab (A&E Lab), January term courses abroad, student summer research and internships abroad, and student dissemination of research. Each of these high-impact practices (HIPs) alone has been empirically demonstrated to enrich student experiences, but when linked in succession through a scaffolded framework, student learning was synergistically magnified. The personal growth, academic interests, and career trajectory of students who completed all stages of the …

Ecosystems And Nature Club, Megan Ott, Joycin Stonacek

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

For students to appreciate the diversity and complexity of the environment around them, foster stewardship, and facilitate interactions with ecosystems

Promoting Healthy Decision-Making Via Natural Environment Exposure: Initial Evidence And Future Directions, Meredith S. Berry, Meredith A. Repke, Alexander L. Metcalf, Kerry Jordan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Research within psychology and other disciplines has shown that exposure to natural environments holds extensive physiological and psychological benefits. Adding to the health and cognitive benefits of natural environments, evidence suggests that exposure to nature also promotes healthy human decision-making. Unhealthy decision-making (e.g., smoking, non-medical prescription opioid misuse) and disorders associated with lack of impulse control [e.g., tobacco use, opioid use disorder (OUD)], contribute to millions of preventable deaths annually (i.e., 6 million people die each year of tobacco-related illness worldwide, deaths from opioids from 2002 to 2017 have more than quadrupled in the United States alone). Impulsive and unhealthy …

Teachers' Instructional Decisions And Student Agency In New Purposefully Designed Learning Spaces, Yanira Oliveras Ortiz, Dalane Bouillion, Lizzy Asbury

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

Learning that promotes student agency and active, cognitive student engagement has a positive impact on students’ self-efficacy, learning, and achievement. When designing lessons that foster student agency and active engagement, educators must consider multiple variables, including the space where learning will take place. In order to understand how students perceive the impact of spaces in learning and how designed areas are being used by teachers, a qualitative study was conducted at a newly designed energy industry-focused high school. This manuscript presents the students' perspectives related to student agency, the value of learning, students' role in their learning, and how cognitively …

Natural Categorization: Electrophysiological Responses To Viewing Natural Versus Built Environments, Salif Mahamane, Nick Wan, Alexis Porter, Allison S. Hancock, Justin Campbell, M. S. Lyons, Kerry Jordan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Environments are unique in terms of structural composition and evoked human experience. Previous studies suggest that natural compared to built environments may increase positive emotions. Humans in natural environments also demonstrate greater performance on attention-based tasks. Few studies have investigated cortical mechanisms underlying these phenomena or probed these differences from a neural perspective. Using a temporally sensitive electrophysiological approach, we employ an event-related, implicit passive viewing task to demonstrate that in humans, a greater late positive potential (LPP) occurs with exposure to built than natural environments, resulting in a faster return of activation to pre-stimulus baseline levels when viewing natural …

Presence Of Electron Donor/Acceptor Radiographic Contrast Media In Unusual Photosynthesis Environment Of Fresh Plant Cells: Near-Infrared And X-Ray Characterization, Tetiana Soloviova, Subhendra Sarkar, Amina Shahbaz, Aldona Gjoni

Publications and Research

Photosynthesis is a chemical process through which light energy is used to convert inorganic material (water and carbon dioxide) into organic molecules. Anaerobic photosynthesis, also known as anoxygenic photosynthesis, is the process by which certain bacteria use light energy to create organic compounds but do not adequately involve oxygen. In this experiment we are trying to influence photosynthesis (light and dark reactions: PS-I and PS-II by electron rich gadolinium/iodine complexes like Eovist and Isovue. We also performed X-ray and NIR reflection spectroscopy (NIRS) to measure Gd difusivity and PS-I/II infrared response. The results for X-ray (45kvp and 5 Mas ) …

Learning Through Play Experience Tool: Contextual Data Tools, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

Monitoring Learning

The Learning through Play (LtP) Experience Tool was developed for use at LEGO House to observe and measure the quality of children’s play experiences. The LtP Experience Tool includes a set of Contextual Data Tools. The primary purpose of the Contextual Data Tools: "is to put the LtP Experience Tool into ‘context’, by emphasising that we are not assessing the individual child assuming that there is something wrong with the child’s performance or behaviour. But that we are measuring the child to understand whether anything should be changed in the context/environment/facilitation around the child". The Contextual Data Tools …

Environmental Activism, Ellen Dexter, Lydia Dexter

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

An after school book club that follows Greta Thunberg's book of speeches No One is Too Small to Make a Difference , as well as uses hands-on activities to teach the importance of environmental activism.

Flexible Seating In The Classroom, Sara N. Wright

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

This literature review discusses flexible seating in the classroom. It explains specific types of flexible seating that was found in recent relevant research most often. These seating types are therapy balls, inflatable cushions, standing desks, and foot fidgets. Next, the importance of the physical layout and environment of the classroom is examined. This literature review goes on to explore the benefits and challenges of flexible seating. Some benefits are engagement, positive behavior, movement, social impacts, and student choice. Some challenges are expense, storage and space, discomfort and balance, and incorrect use. There are multiple considerations educators need to take when …

How To Promote Education For Sustainable Development? Vision Of The Educational Situation And Its Contribution To Sustainable Development., Khalid Aada

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the last decade, the importance of leaving a rational paradigm, debtor of functionalist and utilitarian models, towards another more congruent with the preservation of natural resources, and therefore of life, has been widely discussed. In the same way, different voices have been raised, pointing out the urgency of inserting these precepts into the educational field, hoping to achieve the true cultural transformation that is needed to consolidate the change. Multiple International Entities promote sustainability in Education as an initiative that should be ambitious, complex and reforming character, given the global scope of the social, economic and environmental situation affecting …

Visualization And Analysis Of Environmental Data, Sean Macdonald

Publications and Research

The virtual exploration of place has been employed in a variety of learning environments across many disciplines, creatively expanding upon the experience of place. This chapter explores the value of mapping environmental data as a tool that can enhance students’ virtual exploration of place as they investigate local environmental policies and problems within their own urban surroundings. This visualization project engages students in making meaningful connections between the theoretical study of local and global environmental problems and the “observation” and investigation of these data using mapped data. The virtual learning environment is viewed as one that is interactive, exploring how …

Lesson Plan, U.S. History, 8th Grade, George Saldaña

Fall Workshop October 2019

TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills): 1A

Lesson objective(s): How humans interact with the environment 1. Google maps

Differentiation strategies to meet diverse learner needs: Pics and videos

Art And The Environment, Ellen Dexter, Lydia Dexter

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

After school club that teaches the importance of sustainable practices and conversation activities through art projects and imagination.

Green Club After School Program Curriculum, Megan Willburn

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

Green Club is an after school program which encourages students to develop environmental empathy, passions for environmental sustainability, and knowledge about the workings of environmental systems.

Elevating The Environment Through Artistic Expression, Becky Gumbrewicz

Senior Honors Projects

REBECCA GUMBREWICZ (Environmental Science and Management)

Elevating the Environment Through Artistic Expression

Sponsor: Judith Swift (Communication Studies, Coastal Institute)

Currently there are multiple areas of environmental concern that require not only scientific research but increased public awareness in order to motivate further action toward preservation of our environment or remediation of human impacts. To promote a broader perspective of the most effective ways to communicate science, this project offers the culmination of an environmentally-focused art showcase of student interpretations of science that one could posit elevated public perception of the environment. An integral part of conducting research is understanding how …

Sustaining Our Communities Through Care And Action: An Exploration Of Indigenous, Feminist Environmental Care Ethics, Kate Rayner Fried

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Dominant Environmental ethics have particular relationships with place that are predicated on ongoing settler colonialism and relationships to land that are exploitative and disconnected from the self. Understanding Indigenous, Feminist, and Indigenous Feminist care ethics between people and the environment as actors with agency and responsibility to each other disrupts this framework and provides an alternative path that gets at the root of systems of exploitation and oppression. Understanding these ethics as multifaceted and pre-colonial, as well as emerging from the current time period differentiates an ethic of care and the centering of indigenous epistemologies from the appropriation of indigenous …

Objective Knowledge, Subjective Knowledge, And Prior Experience Of Organic Cotton Apparel, Han Tae-Im

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships between objective knowledge, subjective knowledge, and prior experience of organic cotton apparel and their effects on purchase behaviors. The sample of the present study consisted of Millennial consumers living in the United States. Multiple regression and cluster analysis were used to assess the relationship among variables. Objective and subjective knowledge related to organic cotton apparel had a weak relationship suggesting they are distinct measures of knowledge. Direct experience, indirect experience, and education level were significant predictors of subjective knowledge, however, they had insignificant effects on objective knowledge. Furthermore, consumers who …

Ne Stem 4u Afterschool Intervention Leads To Gains In Stem Content Knowledge For Middle School Youth, Christine E. Cutucache, Taylor Boham, Jamie Luhr, Amie Sommers, Nikolaus Stevenson, Erkko Sointu, Kati Mäkitalo‐Siegl, Sirpa Kärkkäinen, Teemu Valtonen, Neal Grandgenett, William Tapprich

Biology Faculty Publications

Afterschool interventions in STEM are linked to learning gains during the school day. These opportunities engage and excite students about STEM concepts since they observe a more hands-on, project-oriented approach. Often these opportunities for afterschool interventions are infrequent in nature and leave gaps for students in their maturation and understanding. Herein we describe the first report of an afterschool intervention, named NE STEM 4U, targeting socioeconomically disadvantaged middle school youth via a twice weekly, year-long intervention, studied across two years. We assessed the impact of this program on i.) short-term, individual student gains in STEM content knowledge and ii.) delivery …

Delay Discounting As An Index Of Sustainable Behavior: Devaluation Of Future Air Quality And Implications For Public Health, Meredith S. Berry, Norma P. Nickerson, Amy L. Odum

Psychology Faculty Publications

Poor air quality and resulting annual deaths represent significant public health concerns. Recently, rapid delay discounting (the devaluation of future outcomes) of air quality has been considered a potential barrier for engaging in long term, sustainable behaviors that might help to reduce emissions (e.g., reducing private car use, societal support for clean air initiatives). Delay discounting has been shown to be predictive of real world behavior outside of laboratory settings, and therefore may offer an important framework beyond traditional variables thought to measure sustainable behavior such as importance of an environmental issue, or environmental attitudes/values, although more research is needed …

The Global Energy Crisis, Katie Calhoun

Facing the Future Lessons

The world is at an energy tipping point. Countries and communities can choose to be proactive or wait and be reactive, however it is much less costly to do the former. In this project, high school environmental science students will examine the current energy use and concerns in a named country or community, analyze the pros and cons of the current energy situation and how it effects the social, economic and environmental aspects of the culture, then create a more sustainable, resilient plan for that country.

Teachers' Perceptions Of School Climate In High Performing Schools And Low Performing Schools, Briget Ethier

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative, causal comparative research study was to determine if there was a significant difference in teachers’ perceptions of school climate between high performing schools and low performing schools. The study investigated teachers’ perceptions of overall school climate, collaboration, decision-making, instructional innovation, student relations, and school resources. Data was collected from 75 teachers in three high performing schools and 75 teachers in three low performing schools from one school district. The Revised School Level Environment Questionnaire (Revised SLEQ) was the instrument utilized in the study to measure teachers’ perceptions of overall school climate in addition to the …

Life And Death, Joan Houser

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A collection four short stories that center around environmental themes, specifically relationships between people and how those differ from people's relationship with the environment.

Environmental Mental Models Of College Students, Melissa R. Wuellner, Leslie Vincent, Brandi Felts

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Primary and secondary students in the United States are provided environmental education in their curricula due in part to national legislation, but higher education, for many U.S. citizens, is the last opportunity to educate young adults about the environment and humans’ role in it in a formalized setting. Pre-college education and other life experiences or ways of learning can shape a student’s mental model of the environment. While some previous research has focused on understanding environmental mental models of primary and secondary students, only one study to date has evaluated models of college students. Further, no study has evaluated potential …

The Influence Of Physical Activity On International Graduate Students’ Cross-Cultural Adjustment: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study, Shuang Li, Sam Zizzi

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

International students face multiple challenges due to cross-cultural transition. Physical activity plays a significant role in maintaining health and well-being for college students. Little research has explored how international students’ physical activity interacts with their acculturation. Using a longitudinal qualitative approach with individual interviews and non-participant observation, the current study examined how physical activity interacted with new international students’ transition in the United States. Nine first-year international students who engaged in weekly physical activity were enrolled. Each individual was interviewed twice,in the middle (i.e., Jan and Feb) and at the end of their first academic year (i.e., May and June). …

Have You Counted The Ingredients On Your Child's Lunch Tray?: An Economic Analysis Of Sustainability Initiatives Within The School Lunch Program, Vanessa R. Scalora

Business and Economics Summer Fellows

In 2010, President Obama signed the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, establishing a monetary incentive for schools that served meals following a more rigorous nutritional requirement than standard guidelines. This act is a step in the right direction towards placing more importance on school lunches, however America’s lunchroom practices continue to be environmentally unsustainable, and students absorb this message. The production and transportation of processed cafeteria food contributes to climate change, its packaging is polluting, and its consumption contributes to obesity. The use of premade foods and sales from vending machines increase as lunch times grow ever shorter. In addition, …