Stakeholder responses to core aspects of integrated STEM education: Instrument development and pilot study

The present paper reports on work undertaken within the frame of the STE(A)M IT project on integrated STEM education (Erasmus + program; Grant agreement 612845-EPP-1-2019-1- BE-EPPKA3-PI-FORWARD). We will focus on a comprehensive review of grey and scientific literature published on integrated STEM and how this background desk research informed the development of an instrument designed to elicit stakeholder responses to core aspects of integrated STEM education. We have pilot tested the instrument to assess the validity and reliability of the scales it includes and we present the results of this pilot study together with some implications for educational policy and stakeholder involvement

Examining the added value of the use of an experiment design tool among secondary students when experimenting with a virtual lab

International audienc

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry–based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed account of Go-Lab, an ecosystem that supports teachers in creating Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs). These ILSs are built around STEM–related online laboratories. Within the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can combine these online laboratories with multimedia material and learning apps, which are small applications that support learners in their inquiry learning process. The Go-Lab ecosystem offers teachers ready–made structures, such as a standard inquiry cycle, alternative scenarios or complete ILSs that can be used as they are, but it also allows teachers to configure these structures to create personalized ILSs. For this article, we analyzed data on the design process and structure of 2414 ILSs that were (co)created by teachers and that our usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain–related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private.</p

Social Sustainability as Social Learning: Insights from Multi-Stakeholder Environmental Governance

Social sustainability has for long been either neglected or downplayed in scientific literature and policy making and it remains an unsettled concept. The present paper critically examines several explanations for the unequal development of the social component of sustainability and suggests that social learning can serve as an insightful anchor for conceptualizing and operationalizing social sustainability. Collaborative governance is used to showcase this approach, specifically, a targeted review of multi-stakeholder schemes in natural resource management, wildlife conservation, and protected area governance. These schemes can exemplify a wide array of commonalities between the fields of social sustainability and social learning and reveal a fruitful cross-fertilization of the two concepts. The paper wishes to make two contributions. First, a specific dialectic between stakeholder collaboration and conflict under power asymmetries will be illustrated, which is characteristic in the operation of many multi-stakeholder governance schemes. Second, the need for scaffolding social learning in such schemes will be demonstrated so that a process-oriented account of social sustainability is attained. The way out offered by the present paper is that the dynamics between collaboration and conflict, properly managed by means of a toolkit with social learning templates for multi-stakeholder environmental governance schemes, may serve as a precondition for innovations sought

Social representations on ecotourism - scheduling interventions in protected areas

The basic question posed is how the term ecotourism is represented by various stakeholders. The Dadia Forest Reserve has been selected as the study area. This area is regarded among the most successful Greek case studies, as far as environmental management is concerned. It is also regarded as one of the best examples of ecotourism development: The reserve disposes of a well-organized ecotourism programme, while ecotourists have significantly increased in numbers during the last years. The aim of the dissertation is the reconstruction of representations on ecotourism held by three social groups: namely, by local residents, by staff-members of administration bodies involved in environmental management, in general, and ecotourism development, in specific, as well as by visitors of the Dadia Forest Reserve. The objective of the first paper is the structural and narrative reconstruction of representations of ‘nature’, ‘wildlife’ and ‘landscape’, held by rural residents of the Dadia Forest Reserve. Data collection involved in-depth interviews. Employing a social representations’ approach, we recovered representational elements that are expected in the case of rural belief systems such as negative dispositions towards wolves and foxes, as well as elements of an urban adherence, such as nature’s independence. Representational elements refer to visual aspects of the countryside, which seem compatible with the figurative nucleus of the rural idyll. Concerning ‘wildlife’, residents focused on vultures, which comprise the main tourist attraction of the reserve. Scientific knowledge adds to the complexity of the narrative schema, which corresponds to the representation of ‘wildlife’. Interviewees perceived the rural landscape as an interface between the natural and the human-conditioned environment. Our study shows that interviewees make no reference to environmental conservation of quality of life issues, as it could be expected according to relatively wide definitions of the term ‘environmentalism’. Environmental messages reinforced by ecotourism development seem to be recalled primarily in terms of their compatibility with the perceived economic benefit of local people. Despite ecotourism development, representational elements that diverge from a tourist version of ‘nature’, ‘wildlife’ and ‘landscape’ were not pronounced within rural belief-systems. Further interventions within the study area are needed, in order to address a variety of topics under the environmental conservation discourse and raise the environmental awareness of rural residents. The second study aims at the structural and narrative reconstruction of representations of ‘environment’, ‘nature’, and ‘ecotourism’ held by members of administrative bodies involved in ecotourism management and visitors of the Dadia Forest Reserve. We employed a word association task method and used a classification system in order to content analyze associations. The structural reconstruction revealed that the degree of homogeneity of association category profiles between target groups proved to be quite high for each stimulus term. Sample characteristics demonstrated a rather limited mediation in the occurrence probabilities of association categories. The rather loose interrelation of the tourism image of ‘ecotourism’ with the environmentalist one, shown by the narrative reconstruction, should be attributed to the incompatibility between biophobic depictions of the term ‘environment’ and biophilic depictions of the term ‘nature’. In order to face this dualism, ecotourism managers are suggested to focus environmental messages promoted through ecotourism development on the interplay between society and nature.Το βασικό ερευνητικό ερώτημα της διατριβής είναι, πώς αναπαρίσταται ο οικοτουρισμός ως έννοια από τις διάφορες εμπλεκόμενες κοινωνικές ομάδες. Ως περιοχή μελέτης επιλέχθηκε η Προστατευόμενη Περιοχή του Δάσους Δαδιάς, η οποία θεωρείται ένα από τα πιο επιτυχημένα παραδείγματα περιβαλλοντικής διαχείρισης στον ελλαδικό χώρο. Θεωρείται, επίσης, πρότυπο οικοτουριστικής ανάπτυξης, αφού στη Δαδιά αναπτύχθηκε το πρώτο οργανωμένο πρόγραμμα υποδοχής, ξενάγησης και φιλοξενίας των επισκεπτών του δάσους, ο αριθμός των οποίων αυξάνεται σημαντικά τα τελευταία χρόνια. Στόχος της διατριβής είναι η ανασυγκρότηση των αναπαραστάσεων με αντικείμενο τον οικοτουρισμό για τρεις ομάδες αναφοράς: για τους κατοίκους της Προστατευόμενης Περιοχής του Δάσους Δαδιάς, για τα στελέχη των φορέων που εμπλέκονται στην περιβαλλοντική διαχείριση, γενικότερα, και την οικοτουριστική ανάπτυξη, ειδικότερα, και για τους επισκέπτες της Προστατευόμενης Περιοχής. Στόχος της πρώτης εργασίας είναι η δομική και αφηγηματική ανασυγκρότηση των αναπαραστάσεων των κατοίκων της Δαδιάς με αντικείμενο τη ‘φύση’, την ‘άγρια πανίδα’ και το ‘τοπίο’. Η συλλογή των δεδομένων έγινε με συνεντεύξεις βάθους. Προσδιορίστηκαν στοιχεία αναμενόμενα για συστήματα ιδεών των τοπικών κοινωνιών της υπαίθρου, όπως αρνητικές προδιαθέσεις απέναντι στους λύκους και τις αλεπούδες, καθώς και στοιχεία συναφή με συστήματα ιδεών πολιτών αστικών πολεοδομικών συγκροτημάτων, όπως η ανεξαρτησία της φύσης. Στοιχεία της αναπαράστασης της ‘φύσης’ παραπέμπουν σε εικόνες της υπαίθρου συμβατές με τον οπτικό πυρήνα του ‘αγροτικού ειδυλλίου’. Αναφορικά με την άγρια πανίδα, οι ερωτώμενοι επικεντρώθηκαν στους γύπες, οι οποίοι αποτελούν το είδος σύμβολο της Δαδιάς. Η επιστημονική γνώση φαίνεται να αυξάνει την πολυπλοκότητα του αφηγηματικού σχήματος που αντιστοιχεί στην αναπαράσταση της ‘άγριας πανίδας’. Οι συνεντευξιαζόμενοι προσλαμβάνουν το αγροτικό τοπίο ως επιφάνεια διαντίδρασης μεταξύ του φυσικού και του ανθρωπογενούς περιβάλλοντος. Στις συνεντεύξεις δε γίνεται καμία αναφορά σε θέματα περιβαλλοντικής προστασίας ή ποιότητας ζωής, όπως θα ανέμενε κανείς, σύμφωνα με έναν ευρύ προσδιορισμό της έννοιας ‘περιβαλλοντισμός’. Τα στοιχεία που αναφέρονται στον περιβαλλοντισμό και ενισχύονται από την οικοτουριστική ανάπτυξη φαίνεται να ανακαλούνται κυρίως με κριτήριο τη συμβατότητά τους με το προσδοκώμενο οικονομικό όφελος των κατοίκων της τοπικής κοινωνίας. Παρά την οικοτουριστική ανάπτυξη, δεν εντοπίστηκαν στοιχεία που αποκλίνουν από μια τουριστική εκδοχή της ‘φύσης’, της ‘άγριας πανίδας’ και του ‘τοπίου’. Κρίνεται αναγκαίο να γίνουν πρόσθετες παρεμβάσεις στην περιοχή μελέτης, ώστε να τεθεί μία σειρά θεμάτων στο πλαίσιο της περιβαλλοντικής διαχείρισης και να ενισχυθεί η περιβαλλοντική ευαισθητοποίηση των κατοίκων της Δαδιάς

Trade-offs in the implementation of good practice in large carnivore conservation and management

Challenges related to increasing large carnivore populations in Europe led to the establishment of the EU Platform on Coexistence between People and Large Carnivores. We present the work undertaken by the Secretariat of the Platform in analyzing case studies in large carnivore conservation and management, which reflected good practice. We focused on 10 case studies ranging from concrete damage prevention methods to broader stakeholder involvement. For these cases, we interviewed stakeholder members with direct involvement. The short listing of case studies was based on the good practice they demonstrated in terms of both conservation and positive outcomes for stakeholder interaction. Our analysis showed that we have much to learn from the unplanned side effects of the actions undertaken, which stakeholders negotiated as part of the process of working together (further referred to as "trade-offs"). We examined how stakeholders dealt with these trade-offs and how they might lead to adaptations in their future interactions. Stakeholders' responses focused in particular on the following areas: institutional backing of damage prevention and/or compensation; intergroup and in-group relations between stakeholders; instances where costs outweighed benefits; and threats posed by large carnivores. Our findings suggest a need to reconsider what we mean by good practice. In particular, "win-win" solutions may not be realistic, nor even desirable as a management goal. An overconcentration on win-win options may lead to a downplaying of the costs for particular stakeholder groups, which in the end is likely to be counterproductive. Our results indicate that good practice should not be understood as meaning an absence of obstacles but that such obstacles are effectively overcome by stakeholders to achieve desirable outcomes in a specific setting. This conceptualization of good practice has considerable implications for stakeholder engagement in participatory processes and may promote social learning