Construct of Youth Environmental Citizenship among International Large-Scale Educational Studies

Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level. Previous analysis provided important evidence that environmental-citizenship education practice in Nordic schools has a significant positive association with heightened attitudes and magnified behaviours among students toward environmental actions now and in the future. This paper starts with critiques on the strengths and limitations of ICCS 2016 data measures of youth environmental citizenship, and then it provides an overview of measures applied in a few other large-scale international studies such as PISA 2015 and PISA 2018. At the end, we present a measurement proposal on environmental citizenship through combining the measures from these studies

The Young Environmental Citizens in Nordic Countries : Their Concerns, Values, Engagement, and Intended Future Actions

This chapter presents an analysis of students’ concerns, values, engagement, and intended future participation on environmental issues in relation to their home socioeconomic background, gender, and migrant status. Analyzing IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 data of Nordic countries, we first present descriptions of student responses to all questions related to environmental issues and compare Nordic results with European and international averages. Then, we construct a composite score of student environmental citizenship for investigating its relationship with student background factors such as gender, migrant status, and home socioeconomic status through comparing means between student groups with different background characteristics. Lastly, we apply factorial ANOVA analysis method to examine the effect sizes of student background factors and the interactions between them on youth environmental citizenship in the four countries. The results show that there are both similarities and small variations in elements of student environmental citizenship among the Nordic countries and in comparison with their European and international peers. Nordic students stand out as the concerned environmental citizens while they are somehow lower than their European and international peers in engagement, values, and intended participation of environmental citizenship. We find that student environmental citizenship is socially divided in all Nordic countries as it differs significantly between students from different socioeconomic strata and genders. Although not all differences of student environmental citizenship by migrant status are statistically significant among the Nordic countries, we find some significant influence of migrant status interaction with socioeconomic statuses and genders.Peer reviewe

Transformation toward sustainability in Finnish teacher education policy : Promises and shortcomings

While the state of the world is becoming ever more unsustainable, transformation and transformative learning have become increasingly relevant and raised attention in various sustainability education discourses. This is obvious in both policy and research. As teacher educators, we have studied how this sustainability and transformative education trend is visible in education policy. We have first read international policy and research on sustainability education and transformation. In a more thorough study, our focus has been on two recent and fundamental policy documents outlining the Finnish teacher education. Our results show that even if several UNESCO policies documents for years have called for a transformation toward sustainability through education, the Finnish teacher education policy has not yet fully acknowledged sustainability issues and teachers' transformative agency in addressing them, but emphasize other aims. Therefore, it is mainly up to the individual teacher educators and the leaders of their faculties to decide on how to prepare student teachers not only to deal with changes in general, but to particularly bring about changes towards sustainability.Peer reviewe

Editorial: Transformative Learning, Teaching and Action in the Most Challenging Times

This Research Topic invited articles on sustainability-related transformative learning, transformative teaching, and transformative actions or practices in the field of higher education. The focus was based on the proposition that classic models of education have not managed to deal with the complexity of current socio-environmental world problems. Therefore, sustainability education should offer learning settings and promote learning processes that enable learners to critically reflect on their attitudes, values, paradigms, and worldviews, which may lead to conceptual change and thus transformative learning (Sterling, 2011; Balsiger et al., 2017; Rieckmann, 2020).Non peer reviewe

Construct of Youth Environmental Citizenship among International Large-Scale Educational Studies

Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level. Previous analysis provided important evidence that environmental-citizenship education practice in Nordic schools has a significant positive association with heightened attitudes and magnified behaviours among students toward environmental actions now and in the future. This paper starts with critiques on the strengths and limitations of ICCS 2016 data measures of youth environmental citizenship, and then it provides an overview of measures applied in a few other large-scale international studies such as PISA 2015 and PISA 2018. At the end, we present a measurement proposal on environmental citizenship through combining the measures from these studies

Environmental Citizenship in a Nordic Civic and Citizenship Education Context

This study uses data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 (ICCS 2016) conducted in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (students, N=18,962; teachers, N=6,119; school principals, N=630). We look at students’ attitudes, awareness, and behavior in relation to the educational goals and pedagogical means of teachers and school leaders working toward environmental citizenship. Drawing on the pragmatic framework of John Dewey and the contemporary experiential learning model, we identify some key school conditions and pedagogical approaches to education for environmental citizenship education. Based on the whole-school approach to environmental education, we seek to understand in what ways school environment and educational practices may positively affect student attitudes and behaviors that promote environmental citizenship. The objective is to identify the extent to which the school environment and citizenship educational activities are efficacious in fostering environmental citizenship attitudes and behaviors in students