Sustainability Science

Complementary interactional contexts facilitate learning about the environment in everyday life

To address today's sustainability challenges and move toward societal transformation, people must continually learn about and develop skills to enact effective, informed change. Only a small portion of any human's lifespan is spent in formal education; thus, it is critical to explore the daily-life interactional contexts in which people learn—i.e., gain awareness, conceptual knowledge, and procedural skills to take action—with regard to environmental issues. Yet, to date, little attention has focused on where and when people learn about the environment and are motivated to make change through the course of everyday-life activities. We therefore pursued a study exploring such questions using modified focus groups (“community listening sessions”) that involved more than 100 participants from the San Francisco Bay ecoregion of California (USA). We built upon an existing framework of sociocultural learning to distinguish nine key interactional contexts, six of which were previously developed and three we added to reflect the unique nature of environmental learning. These interactional contexts are: distributed resources (e.g., internet, books); informal institutions (e.g., museums, aquariums); laws and policies; the biophysical environment; family; community members; school; friends/peers; and work. We call for more scholarly and practitioner attention to these settings as we work to engage a broader swath of the global public in meaningful action related to pressing sustainability issues.