Understanding Environmental Heterodoxy via EcoTypes View Digital Media

Colloquium
Jim Proctor,  Sailaja Nandigama,  Naciba Chassagnon,  Aideen Foley  

We present in-progress results and future directions of a cross-national collaboration involving EcoTypes, an online survey and set of resources our undergraduate students use to explore ideas and frameworks by which they approach environmental issues. Launched in 2017, the EcoTypes survey has now been completed roughly 7000 times, and we are broadening our network via a collaborative online international learning (COIL) resource. The EcoTypes survey offers an empirically-based comparison of environmental frameworks, with five major resultant EcoTypes summarized by names such as Small is Beautiful, Science for Humanity, and Indigenous Justice. More fundamentally, it offers a starting point for students to explore this heterodoxy of environmental frameworks in the context of three statistically-derived themes—Place, Knowledge, and Action—for which geographic differences are expected to be significant. We plan for the EcoTypes COIL to offer training and support to instructors, and learning activities for students to advance conceptual rigor, appreciate ideological heterodoxy, and build skills in communicating across these differences. We also plan to translate the EcoTypes COIL to assist non-English speaking students. Presentation titles include: (Jim Proctor) “EcoTypes: Exploring Environmental Frameworks”; (Naciba Chassagnon) “Small is Beautiful: From E.F. Schumacher to ESSCA”; (Aideen Foley) “Using EcoTypes to Approach Knowledge Decolonization”; (Sailaja Nandigama) “Controversies Around Environmental Action among Undergraduates in BITS Pilani.” We invite session attendees to ask questions concerning both the larger scholarly dimensions of EcoTypes and its applications to teaching and learning, and we invite attendees to consider joining our collaborative group in future.