Global warming and ocean acidification (OA) have been critical issues to the Oregon Coast and fisheries (Climate Change and Oregon’s Estuaries, NA). The concept and the effects of OA on marine ecosystem have only become widely recognized in the past decade. According to Schubel et al. (2008), raising public awareness and understanding of ocean issues could promote political will to pay attention to these problems. Furthermore, Olzak and Soule (2009) mentioned that protest combining with public opinions is more efficient than environmental advocacy to influence political decision making. However, the public usually finds it hard to understand these kinds of abstract issues (e.g., climate change and OA) (Sharma, 2018). Therefore, to promote public science learning and environmental stewardship, this study investigates the impacts of environmental identities (e.g., culture and traditional knowledge) on science learning within a family in a free-choice learning setting and examines the effectiveness of different approaches used in the free-choice learning setting to facilitate the public science learning based on their identities and interest and future museum exhibition designs. This study is based on post-positivist paradigm with case study approach by using interviews and field notes as data collection methods.
Results/Conclusions
In my pilot study, I found that environmental identities could affect how the public interprets and learns OA. To be specific, the result showed that we can categorize the public into food-oriented group and ecosystem-oriented group based on their interest. This indicated that although two groups are attracted to the OA exhibition based on their interest (i.e., marine food security and marine ecosystem crisis and conservation), both approaches raise the public awareness on OA and even climate change. In this study, I would like to go a step further to investigate how different worldview (i.e., traditional worldview versus western worldview), environmental history, and cultures affect the public’s interpretation and learning on OA.
Keywords: ocean acidification, free-choice learning, environmental identity, traditional science knowledge, environmental stewardship