Environmental Information Literature Review

I'm in the middle of my fourth full week of doctoral studies at the University of Tennessee. This has been a fascinating, energizing, confusing, and overwhelming experience. And fun!!!

So much new information to process. How will I organize it all?
So many responsibilities to juggle - classes, ScienceLinks2 projects, my own research, family, friends, church, health....  What's the best way structure my time?

This week, I began a literature review on Environmental Literacy/Education at the university level. This is an interesting topic to me, one that I'd like to incorporate into my own research. The lit review is for the new Environmental Information class (IS 495) the ScienceLinks2 doctoral students are developing with Miriam Davis. She's a post-doctoral student, and she'll teach the class in the spring. We will have opportunity to teach the this course in future semesters throughout our doctoral studies.

I utilized these search techniques:

• browsed the Journal of Environmental Education online contents (very helpful and encountered several useful articles)
• UTK Libraries article search using these terms / phrases: "environmental education" "environmental literacy" "university"  (this search was preliminary, I didn't try synonyms such as "ecology" "sustainability" etc.)
• looked at the references at the end of articles and tagged those of interest for future retrieval; noted potentially relevant journal titles, and looked for patterns in journal names/authors - who's publishing and where?
• searched directly in Web of Science, refining my results "environmental education research" (this is the name of a journal)

I also spoke with Miriam a few times, and she provided many helpful resources:

• Bruce Grant's website about ecological education
• a DataONE powerpoint presentation to provide context for the lit review
• a literature review on biodiversity information needs of environmental decision makers by Beth Meko, a UTK graduate student
• and a few additional articles

In my initial scanning, I noticed several common thread / key words including:

• ecology
• participatory
• data intensive
• social learning
• contextualized learning
• place-based
• transformative learning
• situated learning
• constructivist learning (I like this theory!)
• service learning

What else did I find?

• I encountered a book review for The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy
• more research on introducing youth to environmental issues in k-12 than at the university level

This is a fun topic...more to come later!