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"Equitable Environmental Literacy: Investigating Interventions to Increase Environmental Literacy among BIPOC Students "
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Readers/Advisors
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Spring 2022
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2022-05-05
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Poster
Microsoft Powerpoint XML, 5.8 MB
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Abstract
The theme of my poster is Equitable Environmental Literacy among BIPOC students. Environmental literacy has four main components, knowledge, affective attitudes, cognitive skills, and behavior. There is currently inequitable education occurring within natural resources. There is an increasing need to create an environmentally literate society that is prepared to address demanding and emerging environmental issues worldwide. Educational programming is not equipping BIPOC communities with the knowledge to participate in planning, management, and decision making processes. At its core, this is environmental injustice. To further investigate gaps in natural resources, we created a survey to measure student interest in the environment. A pilot survey was conducted during the summer of 2021 and UB students from both PSU and UVM were surveyed on pre-watershed science initiatives. We hypothesized that BIPOC students were less likely to select “agree” and “strongly agree” when answering questions related to having an environmental job and pursuing environmental education in college. The surveys were conducted via google forms and the students identity was kept anonymous. We then combined all answers into a large data set and the analysis was conducted in R. We created bar graphs which show each question asked and the breakdown of the student demographics. The pilot survey indicated that BIPOC students did not rate “agree” or “strongly agree” when answering the questions “I plan to study the environment in college” and “I plan to work in an environmental field”. This further validates current research that indicates BIPOC students are less likely to pursue environmental interests. The next steps in this research are to conduct the same survey during the summer of 2022. During the summer, students will participate in a wide variety of watershed science initiatives. It is our hope that this will stimulate natural resource interest among students in the program.