Can The Use of Environmental and Sustainability Films Influence Undergraduates’ Environmental Worldviews?

Proceedings of ‏The 2nd World Conference on Teaching and Education

Year: 2021

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2nd.worldcte.2021.01.01

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Can The Use of Environmental and Sustainability Films Influence Undergraduates’ Environmental Worldviews?

Michael W. Everett, Crystal L. Eustice, and Matt R. Raven

ABSTRACT: 

In a world where climate change is an increasingly important topic, changing behavior though unique educational approaches may stimulate change in students’ environmental worldview. Use of film is one instructional approach that provides this unique perspective for undergraduate student learners. Integration of film in courses has the potential to increase environmental attitudes through the operationalization of narrative transportation by students transporting themselves into the narrative of the film or another literary work. The purpose of this research was to determine if relationships existed between narrative transportation and environmental attitudes by film theme in an undergraduate environmental and sustainability film course. Overall, new ecological paradigm (NEP) subscales indicated an increase between pre- and post-course survey results indicating that environmental and sustainability films did influence environmental attitude. Results also indicated that there were moderate correlational relationships between student narrative transportation scores and several NEP subscale items for climate, energy, and environmental and sustainability films. These results suggest that certain NEP subscales are influenced by student narrative transportation into film theme storylines. Therefore, based on the NEP scale and subscales analyses, environmental worldview is influenced by the use of environmental and sustainability films as a teaching approach. The authors recommend further research to better understand how different environmental and sustainability themed films relate to narrative transportation of students.

Keywords: environmental attitude, narrative transportation, NEP.