Nature Connectedness and Discursive Spaces; Understanding Student Responses to Sustainability Education

Considering the significant impact of engineering on the environment, educational curricula for engineers should, as a minimum, include courses on sustainability transitions. The Deep Transitions (DT) framework, however, argues that transitions will only be achieved if education is accompanied by the reshaping of students' ideological assemblages, through which sustainability becomes normative. The DT perspective raises two fundamental questions for engineering educators; is the student/lecturer interface appropriate for attempting such changes and if it were to be suitable, how could its extent be articulated and assessed? In this study, the concept of nature connectedness, already described in the field of environmental psychology, is explored as a means of understanding directionality and transition. Students completed a class exercise relating to choices on energy technology, and then participated in a qualitative study to understand their responses. Although the students acknowledge that the classroom is a discursive space, in which new bodies of meaning can be created, the intervention had little impact on their extent of nature connectedness. Changing the latter remains a challenging, if impractical, task for engineering educators.