Learning to reason, learning to lead: from worldviews to professional identities in ecology education

Abstract

Rapid environmental change has made clear that solving ecological problems depends as much on how people make decisions based on what they know. Scientists and natural resource managers must navigate issues that are ecological and technical as well as social, ethical, and political. Because universities prepare many of the people who will face these challenges, ecology and natural resource management (NRM) programs play a central role in shaping how future professionals and decision makers (e.g., voters, taxpayers) learn to interpret information, weigh evidence, and act within complex decision systems. This dissertation examines how students develop and apply decision-making competencies across educational stages (i.e., undergraduate and graduate). Guided by the Values-Rules-Knowledge framework, I examine how students draw on different forms of understanding, norms, and authority when responding to social-ecological problems. In Chapter 2, I explore how undergraduate ecology students reason about socioscientific issues such as species introduction and disease spread, highlighting how their worldviews influence what evidence they consider to be credible or important. Chapter 3 focuses on students' "socioscientific capital," or the knowledge, experiences, and values they use when explaining or justifying environmental decisions. Finally, Chapter 4 follows graduate students in a community-based NRM course as they consider how their worldviews influence their perceptions of their professional role. These studies illustrate the importance of educational spaces and how they shape how students are becoming ecological thinkers and practitioners. Collectively, this dissertation advances understanding of the role of worldviews in decision-making and offers insight into how instruction can promote the development of ecologically literate professionals.