Students & Sustainability
How do students enact, understand, and imagine the meanings and demands of 'sustainability'?
Led by Penn State Geography PhD Student Harman Singh, this collaborative research aims to understand student perspectives on sustainability through interview and survey methods. This research explores students' formative memories of sustainability, motivations for action or inaction, and ideas for how to build more sustainable campuses and communities.
Our first piece from this research project - "Cool (And Sustainable) Places" - is published in Children's Geographies. In this manuscript, we reflect on the role of young peoples' cultural ideas such as "cool" as a way of talking about the behavioral, emotional, and political complexities of sustainable transitions.
Our second piece from this research project is published in Environmental Education Research. In this manuscript, we explore the interplay of students’ conceptual, emotional, and experiential understandings of sustainability and outline pedagogical opportunities that could meaningfully incorporate students' existing sustainability literacies.