Ecophobia: understanding the fear of learning science

Fort Worth, TX

8/12/2009

By: Dr. Mark Bloom, assistant professor of science education

Teaching science-related material to non-science majors in college may cause a host of problems, says Mark Bloom, Ph.D., assistant professor of science education at TCU.

"A lack of thorough knowledge about scientific issues can result in a sense of hopelessness and anxiety," he says. "How can we, as science educators, teach enough science content for learners to be literate enough to make decisions about these critically important issues without feeling vulnerable and helpless to face them?"

The problem occurs because non-science majors cannot be expected to learn deep content about all of the issues, according to Bloom.

It has been argued by many educators that all citizens need to be scientifically literate. Possession of the facts, vocabulary, concepts, history and philosophy needed to understand public issues is a crucial form of literacy since all citizens will have to make decisions about scientifically-based issues throughout their lives. These issues may take the form of personal decisions about healthcare to broad-scale decisions about the future of energy and other environmental actions.

"Ecophobia" is a condition in which a student learns about an environmental problem, but leaves with a helpless sense of dread about the future, rather than a sense of urgency and awareness which could help to reverse the problem. In an effort to educate young people about issues related to environmental degradation, teachers are inadvertently instilling in them a sense of fear and helplessness. Bloom scoffed at the notion that educators should hold back their efforts to educate about such an important issue as climate change for the sake of young learners' emotional health.

"Holding back the truth would do nothing but exacerbate the existing problems we face," he says. "Eventually, I found the evidence I was looking for."

While teaching the non-majors biology course Contemporary Issues in Biology, Bloom was able to teach science using biological topics found in current, mainstream, popular press magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report to guide the course content. The result was a course that used current, mainstream media topics (i.e. drug addiction, diabetes, stem cell research, cloning, and HIV/AIDS) to connect science content to real-world situations.

While the course was popular among the students, there was a downside he found troublesome.

"I realized I was providing my students with the technical content to fully understand the problems currently being tackled by the scientific community, but I was giving them very little guidance on how to address both the social and emotional impact of this knowledge," he says.

To accommodate these concerns, he began to emphasize more clearly the solutions to these problems and more directly guided the students to the brighter side of the issues.

To address the students' uneasiness and to help them develop an awareness of important environmental issues, along with encouraging more active participation in facing them, he introduced the activity "Five Small Steps to Reduce Your Environmental Footprint," which required each student to identify five personal behaviors that negatively impact the environment and find ways that they could change them to be more eco-friendly. To receive credit for the assignment, they were required to justify and document what they had implemented and explain how they believed it would benefit the environment.

Of the 180 students enrolled in the two-class course, 132 participated and came up with 95 distinct eco-friendly actions. The most popular action was to begin recycling, followed by switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs and using natural light. Also, walking instead of driving and turning off water when brushing teeth were high on the list.

In addition, an interesting, yet unintentional result of the project occurred as people outside the classroom would often ask them for more information about the assignment, and subsequently get on board by making their own eco-friendly changes.

"This experience supports the claim that the old idea of knowledge leading to behavioral changes is flawed," Bloom says. "As environmental educators, we should instead approach environmental education with the idea that a sense of agency and control leads to the knowledge of issues and action strategies, which in turn lead to an intention to act."

Mark Bloom, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of science education in TCU's College of Education and Andrews Institute for Mathematics and Science Education.

 

Media contact:
Shawn Kornegay
Associate director of communications
TCU
817-257-5061
s.kornegay@tcu.edu