About

Environmental education research tends to focus on individuals, measuring predictors or changes in individual environmental literacy. But the environmental problems we face today are not solved at the individual level. They require collective action — communities coming together to address large-scale problems. Understanding and encouraging collective action may require a shift in focus from individual to community-level environmental literacy. How is environmental literacy created, shared, and distributed by communities to create community-scale change? We think these are important questions, but the concept of community-level environmental literacy has yet to be formally defined or measured.

On Friday, February 21, North Carolina State University will host a one-day interdisciplinary convening on community-level environmental literacy to move this work and the field forward!

We are gathering a select group of experts from various relevant disciplines — ranging from community psychology to social contagion theory — to discuss a working definition for community-level environmental literacy as well as possible ways to measure it.

This convening is product-oriented. Following the convening, we will be writing a collaborative paper that captures the meeting’s discussions and conclusions. All fully-participating convening attendees will be invited onto this paper as authors. We are also in discussions with Environmental Education Research about the possibility of creating a special issue on community-level environmental literacy that would be open to submissions from convening attendees. Additionally, we will include time at the convening itself for the group to discuss any other meeting outputs of interest and make a concrete plan to complete these products.