“That Is Not My Problem!”

Utilizing the Concept of Psychological Distance in Environmental and Health Education

authored by

Alexander Georg Büssing, Benedikt Heuckmann

Abstract

As part of the Science|Environment|Health pedagogy, educators utilize socioscientific issues to foster student motivation and decision-making processes. However, students will only engage in higher-order learning processes if they perceive the respective issues to be meaningful to them, which means they feel concerned by and close to them. As this connection is currently poorly understood, this chapter proposes the theory of psychological distance as a fine-grained approach to understand more precisely people’s connectedness towards environmental and health issues. Based on the four dimensions of temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distance, we show how psychological distance may relate to science teaching and learning. In particular, we explain how the theory (1) helps to better understand climate action using the example of Fridays for Future, (2) can be used to understand the framing and perception of health messages, and (3) could assist science teachers interested in constructing teaching resources that make use of psychological distance. Additionally, the chapter offers an empirical perspective by illustrating socio-psychological measurement possibilities and results from empirical studies about the connections between psychological distance and teaching motivation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of further applications of psychological distance in environmental and health education within the context of Science|Environment|Health.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Science Education

Type

Contribution to book/anthology

Pages

51-69

No. of pages

19

Publication date

10.12.2021

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 13 - Climate Action

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75297-2_4 (Access: Closed)