Examining students' systems thinking in a natural resources management capstone class

摘要

Critical Literature Review. Humans undisputedly dominate Earth's ecosystems, therefore we need to move beyond 'human-free' conceptions of ecosystems. However, there is a lack of consensus about how humans, our influence, and our social systems fit within ecosystems, and several different terms, such as social-ecological system, are now used to describe integrated systems. The current proliferation of terms and lack of shared meaning causes problems for interdisciplinary researchers as well as students. I propose that our language needs to catch up with our conceptions, and that 'ecosystem' needs to be explicitly defined to include humans, our impacts, and our social systems.;Research Manuscripts. Natural resource management (NRM) decisions have far reaching implications for global ecological change. Because beliefs influence decisions, it is vital that the NRM curriculum reflects the shift to include humans as integrated components of ecosystems to facilitate effective future NRM, however no appropriate metric exists for assessment. Additionally, there is a concern that NRM students are not graduating with well-developed systems thinking, communication, and group work skills. Social-ecological systems (SES) are linked social and ecological systems, and graduates who are able to consider a SES as a whole are better able to address the complex problems in NRM.;I framed my research through the intersection of socio-cultural and conceptual change theories. Socio-cultural theory states that each individual's knowledge and experiences influence how they learn, and conceptual change theory describes the process individuals go through to replace existing conceptions with new conceptions. The intersection of these lenses imbeds conceptual change within an individuals' experiences and knowledge.;My guiding question was: how do students' conceptions of systems thinking change during a one-semester capstone class? Specifically, How do 1) students describe their conceptions of social-ecological systems and resilience as changing over the course of an NRM capstone course, and what do they think helped change them? 2) NRM students situate humans in relation to ecosystems, and more specifically, to the term, ecosystem? 3) NRM students revise their conceptions of 'ecosystem' over the course of their capstone course?;I used phenomenological and grounded theory qualitative research approaches to study the Spring 2014 and 2015 NRM capstone classes at a large research university in the United States. I interviewed students, collected all coursework for analysis, audio recorded lectures, and obtained copies of all lecture presentation materials for analysis.;In my phenomenological study (n=3) I found that students' conceptions of social and biophysical systems became more integrated, and their ideas about systems thinking and resilience broadened to encompass greater complexity. These conceptual shifts were influenced by interactions with other students, natural resource professionals, and stakeholders during class and their semester-long group project. However, some students still held under-developed conceptions of ecosystems, which became the focus of the following two study manuscripts.;From student responses (n=20) and the course context I developed a continuum of human relationships to ecosystems for my metric to address question two: i) exclusion, ii) uncertain-exclusion, iii) uncertain, iv) uncertain-inclusion, and v) inclusion. My continuum provides a useful tool to help unpack the complexity of the human-environment relationship conception, which is a part of the ecological literacy construct.;To address research question three I used my continuum to identify how students' conceptions changed. I found that students' definitions of the relationships between natural and ecosystem, human, and human artifact influenced their conceptions of ecosystems. Students who did not describe ecosystems as natural struggled much less with an integrated human-ecosystem conception than those who described ecosystems as natural.;My overarching findings indicate that students can and do experience conceptual change throughout their capstone course. However, I found that students' conceptions and conceptual shifts were not always consistent with the material presented in the class. Therefore, it is important to teach from a constructivist standpoint (that each individual builds their own meaning of the world, which is influenced by their prior knowledge and experiences), and explicitly co-construct meaning in the classroom.