| Abstract |
The investigation of environmental citizenship is very important in the context of environmental education and sustainability. Environmental problems require citizens who are active, critical thinkers and able to act as agents of change for society and the environment. Environmental citizenship and education for environmental citizenship have recently been investigated within the funded network COST ACTION ENEC (European Network for Environmental Citizenship), while a questionnaire was recently published to measure it among high school students in Cyprus. The purpose of this paper is to measure the environmental citizenship of PTDE University of Crete students using this questionnaire and to investigate its possible correlation with gender, semester of study and place of origin (urban <2000/ rural >2000 area).
The questionnaire included 80 Likert-type statements, in three sections: The first section explores the activities as environmental citizens - Past and present (7 statements). The second section concerns behaviors and qualities/abilities of the environmental citizen and includes five questions about the environment and sustainability, perceptions of environmental citizenship, environmental citizenship skills (6 statements), attitudes (8 statements) and values of environmental citizens (15 statements). The last section relates to future actions as an environmental citizen: within the University (4 statements), outside the University (11 statements) and as a change agent (3 statements).
The questionnaire was administered in digital form (Google Forms) to the academic e-mails of 994 students of the Pedagogical Department of Elementary Education. 167 answered. The data was statistically processed with SPSS version 20. Indicative results are reported:
The sample consisted of 146 women and 21 men. Regarding the semester of study: there were 49 from the 1st year, 32 from the 2nd year, 47 from the 3rd year and 39 from the 4th and 5th years.
In the first section, past actions as an environmental citizen, more than 80% of the participants state that they have never participated in organizations and groups for the protection of the environment in the past. In the second section, where the attitudes of an environmental citizen are mentioned, which includes the knowledge, perceptions, skills, attitudes and values for an environmental citizen, the majority of students (over 80%), in all questions, state that these behaviors are quite or very important. In the last section, the future actions of an environmental citizen, the majority of students (over 80%) are very likely or certain to participate in some of the future actions and act as a change agent in their environment.
In particular, the students of PTDE Crete have relatively high scores in past actions as environmental citizens, in the behaviors of an environmental citizen, in the values of an environmental citizen and are agents of change, while the lowest scores are in the knowledge of an environmental citizen and in future actions outside university. The results of the sample show that the students have developed environmental citizenship to a satisfactory degree.
Finally, a test for gender and urban–rural origin differences in ECQ factor scores was implemented with the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test due to the non-normality of the dependent variables. No statistically significant difference was found between the two sexes or between regions. A test for differences between years of schooling in ECQ factor scores was implemented with the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test due to the non-normality of the dependent variables. A statistically significant difference was found between years of study in the Skills of ECn (F4) factor, with students studying in their third or higher year presenting a higher score than first and second year students (χ2=10.678, p=0.014).
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