Place-based education from three perspectives

Abstract

This article examines the perception of the Czech place-based education program School for Sustainable Development from the perspectives of the participating students, teachers, and representatives of the local municipalities. The study is based on an analysis of paired or group interviews with 47 students, 7 teachers, and 6 representatives. The findings show that while the teachers perceived the process of the students’ involvement in planning and conducting a community-based project as highly participative, the students’ opportunities to shape the process through making their own decisions were rather limited and the teachers kept control over important parts of the process to themselves. While the cooperation of the schools with their respective municipalities was appreciated by most of the respondents, several barriers have been identified. Participation in the project has likely increased the teachers’ self-effectiveness, developed the students’ interpersonal competence, and improved the atmosphere at the schools involved.

Abbreviations: PBE: place-based education; ENEC: European Network for Environmental Citizenship; STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics; SSD: The School for Sustainable Development.     

Student Decision-Making about a Globally Familiar Socioscientific Issue: The value of sharing and comparing views with international counterparts

This paper focuses on the views of 16–17-year-old science students from England, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden on whale hunting, and their perceptions of the views of their international counterparts. The students were all provided with the same decision-making task, discussed the issue in small groups and then presented their views on video, which were shared with their counterparts. The findings show that the decision-making task served to deepen and modify students' views across all nationalities, and the students generally valued and learned from the sharing of views with students of the same age from around the world. However, an important discovery was that the German students' opinions often ran counter to those from the other 3 locations, and the paper cautions against making broad-sweeping generalisations about students' views on socioscientific issues.     

Factors affecting success of training companies

This study aims to identify the key factors which influence the functioning quality and success of training companies. Based on an analysis of the requirements included in the quality management system standards for providers of education and training services, a set of twenty factors has been developed. This was followed by a survey for specifically selected managers of 90 Polish firms, which provide training, who evaluated both the influence of the factors on the probability of success and also the level of difficulty required to accomplish the factors. The findings indicate that the managers of the learning providers need to focus on employing qualified trainers and providing a curriculum which is unique and adjusted to their customers’ needs.     

Parenting and the Adjustment of Children Born to Gay Fathers Through Surrogacy

Findings are presented on a study of 40 gay father families created through surrogacy and a comparison group of 55 lesbian mother families created through donor insemination with a child aged 3–9 years. Standardized interview, observational and questionnaire measures of stigmatization, quality of parent–child relationships, and children's adjustment were administered to parents, children, and teachers. Children in both family types showed high levels of adjustment with lower levels of children's internalizing problems reported by gay fathers. Irrespective of family type, children whose parents perceived greater stigmatization and children who experienced higher levels of negative parenting showed higher levels of parent‐reported externalizing problems. The findings contribute to theoretical understanding of the role of family structure and family processes in child adjustment.     

Reliability of the new environmental paradigm for analysing the environmental attitudes of Senegalese pupils in the context of conservation education projects

The New Environmental Paradigm scale for children was developed and validated in Western nations but has seldom been applied in non-western countries. The aim of the current study is to examine the scale’s validity for schoolchildren in Senegal. The study was conducted in three regions of Senegal in November and December 2015, and a total 782 schoolchildren with an average age of 13 years participated. We used Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis to assess the consistency of the scale. The principal component analysis was used to reveal the different potential dimensions of our data-set. Given the low internal consistency of the scale and the unexpected responses to certain items, the scale seems to be rather unreliable for the investigated population. This difference could be caused by specific cultural features encompassing strong religious beliefs, different understandings of the place of humankind in nature, and weak awareness of humans’ impact on the natural world.     

A Role for Epistemic Insight in Attitude and Belief Change? Lessons from a Cross-curricular Course on Evolution and Creation

This paper presents findings from a quasi-experimental study evaluating future teachers’ attitudes and beliefs in response to a cross-curricular university course on evolution and creation bridging biological and Christian theological perspectives. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that a course providing learning opportunities for epistemic insight within this multidisciplinary arena might have effects on attitudes and beliefs relevant to the field. Hence, the main research question was the following: To what extent do student teachers’ attitudes and beliefs change by attending a cross-curricular course on evolution and creation intended to develop student teachers’ epistemic insight into the nature of science and into the relationship between science and theology? The answer from this quasi-experimental evaluation study (pre–post-design; test group n =?26, control group n =?24) is as follows: It depends upon the variable investigated! Pre–post-analysis using a repeated measures ANOVA revealed that the cross-curricular course integrating epistemic insight induced changes in creationist beliefs, in students’ perception of conflict, and in acceptance of evolution. In contrast, there was no effect on attitudes toward evolutionary theory, on attitudes toward the Biblical accounts of creation, or on scientistic beliefs. However, when student responses were analyzed individually, case-based evidence for belief change in students with scientistic positions emerged. Among the reasons for those different effects, we discuss conceptual differences between attitude and acceptance, features of the student teacher sample, and the particular content of the course explicitly addressing creationism but not scientism. In conclusion, the paper corroborates the role of epistemic insight in the multidisciplinary field of evolution and creation and provides initial evidence that epistemic insight possesses a particular potential concerning positions at both ends of the spectrum.