According to Birdsall (2010), there are three important aspects to environmental action: learning about action, identifying issues, researching them and thinking about possible solutions; learning through action, doing it; and learning from action, giving the students an opportunity to reflect on the action they took and on how successful the action was. The environmental advocacy sessions were designed to facilitate the students through a process of learning about action (Birdsall, 2010). From here the students got to experience how to plan an action and some of the students got to experience taking action. Jointly, this is learning through action (Birdsall, 2010). The second interview with each student explored how the environmental advocacy session went and what they had learnt. It also
indicated if any of the students had taken action and if any of them felt motivated to continue taking action.
Through the environmental advocacy sessions, the students were facilitated through a process to reflect on the place-responsive journey, looking at what they did, learnt and saw along the way, identifying some of the issues facing their place through this reflection that interested them. The group used some form of group decision process to decide on which issue to continue pursuing.
The emotional impact on the students that plastic waste has on the local fauna and landscape motivated the students to choose this issue. It was an issue they could see the relevance of (Lundholm et al., 2013). The students researched the issue by looking at their own rubbish disposal habits, then brainstorming potential solutions (Bolstad, 2003).
With the questioning in the interview, I explored what they actually did and how they achieved that. Further questions to ask would have been ‘what have you learnt about identifying issues you are interested in?’ and ‘what have you learnt about creating solutions to issues that you have identified?’ These would have given the deeper understanding to see what if any learning had occurred that may be applied to other issues.
After deciding on their issue, the students set about planning their action. For Leah, this helped her process the learning more and look at how she could integrate some of the learning into her own life. It would have been beneficial to have probed deeper asking what they had learnt about how to plan an action, again to see if there has been any take away learning. During the planning of the action participation rates started to dwindle. One student was unwell and off school during many of these weeks. For other students, their motivation was low for either the age group they were to work with as part of the action or for the actual action itself. This highlights the issue of attempting to find an issue for a group to collectively
work on. What they believe to be important can differ considerably from each other (Lundholm et al., 2013). This dwindling motivation from the students left only two out of the six even participating in the actual action; high motivation to be involved was the difference between them and the others. It would have been appropriate to ask all the students what they thought action is. This would have given some insights into the learning that had occurred about environmental action.
The students who participated in the action reflected on the process and anecdotally thought their action had been a success. They had no way of actually measuring the success of the action due to the nature of what they decided to do. Probing deeper here and asking why they believed it was a success and trying to get them to articulate how they thought it was successful may have helped them to think about what they may have needed to do to measure the success.
There was also a missed opportunity to find out what all six of the students had learnt from this whole process and asking a question to get all of them to reflect more deeply could have been quite fruitful. One student did offer her learning about how hard it is to organise and motivate a group to take action, and this could just be a further reflection on some of the students’ motivation and engagement with the chosen action, but also how the students’ prioritise what is important.
So had this process given the students the scaffold to develop an intrinsic motivation to act (Bolstad, 2003) or at least develop some action competence? Three out of the six students explained they might take further action. Two of these had an extrinsic motivation to do so, suggesting their behaviour is potentially just being manipulated by the incentive and may only last as long as the incentive is there (Steg & Vlek, 2009), or may be the early development of action competence. The other student was interested in joining a group the following year; it just depended on how busy she felt she was.
One of these three students had made a link to how she lives and adjusted her lunch box to decrease the amount of single-use plastic she used, suggesting altered behaviour here. This student made the connection between the plastic in the sea, effect on marine life and that she could play a part by reducing the amount of plastic she used demonstrating action competence. The other three students just felt they were too busy, and is perhaps an indicator of a lack of involvement with their community (Steg & Vlek, 2009) or their own resilience and ability to look beyond themselves (Fredrickson, 2013). Being engaged with your community and or ability to look beyond yourself are important predictors of people more likely to engage in at least pro-environmental behaviour (Steg & Vlek, 2009) or action competence. I come back to these ideas in the next chapter.