Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

Article Type: Books and resources From: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Volume 11, Issue 3

Edited by Heather Reynolds, Eduardo Brondizio and Jennifer Meta Robinson,Indiana University Press,Bloomington, IN,January 2010,240 pp.,ISBN: 978-0253221506,U$21.95

Even as interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems have become increasingly prominent in public discourse, the training people receive to understand and address such concerns has lagged behind. Thirty odd years after the first Earth Day, for example, only one-third of Americans can pass basic tests of environmental knowledge with grades of C or better. To prepare today’s students to meet growing global environmental challenges, colleges and universities must make environmental literacy a core learning goal for all students, in all disciplines. But what should an environmentally literate citizen know? What teaching and learning strategies are most effective in helping students think critically about human-environment interactions and sustainability, and integrate what they have learned in diverse settings?

In this book, educators from the natural and social sciences and the humanities discuss the critical content, skills, and affective qualities essential to environmental literacy.

This volume is a useful resource for developing integrated, campus-wide programs to prepare students to think critically about, and to work to create, a sustainable society.