Teaching Environmental and Ecological Sciences to Business Students

Abstract

The task of instilling scientific and environmental awareness and knowledge in public- or private-sector management students requires an understanding of the ways in which individuals in a group of learners absorb and appropriate scientific and/or interdisciplinary concepts. In the teaching of science to non-scientific students, the choice of topics is especially important in creating an appropriate environment for learning. In two specific teaching programmes, observations were made of students' reactions to various modes of concept presentation and pedagogical organization. The essential purpose of this teaching-observation approach was to assess how students, together, could make sense of and reconstruct the meaning of different concepts and issues. The initial results presented are consistent with models and theories developed in Francophone research circles and in earlier research by the author, with respect to the notions of ‘knowledge types’, ‘conceptions' and ‘schematization’. The two programmes discussed illustrate the application of the approach in markedly different situations -the first, discussed briefly, a course on agriculture for African immigrants, and the second, discussed in detail, a course on environmental science for business students.

Keywords

knowledge schematization pedagogy environmental studies collaborative learning

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