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180 Pages·2016·1.47 MB·English

PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS AND PRACTICE CHANGE
IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

by
Yue Li
January 2017
© 2017 Yue Li
PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS AND PRACTICE CHANGE
IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

Yue Li, Ph. D.
Cornell University 2017

Professional development programs create communities of practice for environmental
educators to exchange ideas and practice with each other through face-to-face and online
activities. It is particularly important to understand how educators form networks through such
communities, and how these networks impact their environmental education practice. Using
multiple conceptual lenses -- including communities of practice, network formation, practice
theory, professional development, and environmental education -- I examined the relationship
between professional networks and practice change in environmental education. The professional
development programs that are the focus of this study, including a state consortium that brought
together environmental education and youth development professionals, an online learning
community that explored urban environmental education, and a fellowship program focused on
climate change education, are part of the North American environmental education professional
development training program, EECapacity.
First, I explore environmental educators’ communities of practice from a social network
perspective by addressing the question: What were the characteristics of networks and the
processes by which professional networks emerged in three environmental education
professional development communities? I conducted surveys and social network analysis to
examine educators’ networks before and after the professional development programs. The
results showed that educators had more network ties among each other after the programs than
before the programs across all three groups. Also participating in face-to-face meetings and
online interactions increased the likelihood of educators’ forming professional networks.
Next, I applied practice theory to explore the research question: How did environmental
educators change their practice through participating in professional development communities?
I conducted surveys and interviews to investigate educators’ practice change as measured by
elements of practice including goals, audiences, settings, activities, resources and ideas. The
results showed that environmental educators incorporated new resources and ideas into their
practice across all three programs. However, changes in the other practice elements varied
among programs, which I attribute to different program goals and professional development
interventions.
To explore the relationship between network properties, including in-degree, out-degree,
closeness and betweenness centrality and tie strength, and practice change, I conducted
correlation analysis. The results showed that in-degree centrality had a positive relationship with
practice change in the state consortium and the online learning community, and other network
measures only showed significant relationships with practice change in the state consortium.
Finally, to better understand the process of change in networks and practice, I also conducted
interviews in the state consortium and online learning community, and analyzed educators’ mid-
term and final reports in the fellowship program, which showed how the fellowship program and
networking opportunities impacted their practices.
This dissertation explores dimensions of the communities of practice framework from
social network and practice theory perspectives. It advances our understanding of the
mechanisms of network formation, practice change, and the relationship between networks and
practice change in environmental education. I also propose applications for professional
development programs and recommendations for future research.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Yue Li (Chinese: 李悦) was born in 1987 in Yunnan, China. Parents: Jianhong Li and
Meizhi Yu. Yue earned a B.S. in Soil and Water Conservation at Beijing Forestry University in
2008, a M.S. in Natural Resources at Beijing Normal University in 2011, and is completing a Ph.
D. at Cornell University.
Growing up in a remote mountain area in southwestern China, Yue could touch the
natural world freely since early childhood. So climbing mountains, finding mushrooms, watching
birds and picnicking in the woods are the best memories in her mind. After spending 17 years in
natural areas, she went to Beijing for college in 2004. On the first day she went to Beijing Forest
University, she joined the Scientific Exploration and Outdoor Life Association (SENOL). It was
SENOL that opened ways for her to connect to various national and international environmental
non-profit organizations. In 2005, leading a SENOL summer team as a freshman to the Tetraena
mongolica Maxim Nature Reserve in Inner Mongolia triggered her concern about human impact
on the environment. Tetraena mongolica Maxim has been endangered since the 1990s and is still
threatened by goat browsing, logging, and pollution from mining. The conflicts between human
needs and environmental conservation motivated her to explore a “win-win” solution.
These became her concerns for graduate study at Beijing Normal University in 2008. Her
experiences in Dr. Qiong Gao’s laboratory enabled her to access model simulations of social-
ecological systems. For her Master thesis, she made several field trips to the northern farming-
pastoral transitional belt, an ecologically sensitive area in China. She found the marked
transformation between farmland and grassland due to different life styles of local people, which
inspired her to study land-use spatial-temporal variations. Dr. Gao, who graduated from Cornell
University in 1987, encouraged Yue to pursue a PhD in the US.
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Environmental education has fascinated Yue since she started doing volunteer work at
Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in Beijing. In the summer of 2009, as a teaching assistant of the Eco-
English project of JGI, she worked with two high school students from the US in environmental
education at the Experimental School attached to Haidian Teachers Training College of Beijing.
Once a week they offered a forty-minute interactive course in English for high school students
addressing a range of topics including endangered species, moon bear farming, and energy
consumption to global warming. This experience inspired her to continue participating in
environmental education programs. In the summer of 2010, she worked as an intern at JGI
helping the Green Life Action program promote low carbon life styles. She designed the toolkits
for communities and companies focusing on a range of topics from energy and water saving, to
green shopping to recycling. These experiences motivated Yue to learn more about
environmental education.
In August 2011, Yue started her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Marianne Krasny in
the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University. Since then, she has been working for
EECapacity, a national environmental education training program. Yue was a teaching assistant
for the first online EECapacity course -- Urban Environmental Education -- taught by Drs. Alex
Kudryavtsev and Marianne Krasny, which inspired her interests in online learning and social
network analysis.
Through EECapacity online courses and workshops, Yue connected with environmental
educators across the US, which helped her develop her research questions and identify research
participants for her dissertation. Specifically, at the national training workshop in Washington
D.C. in May 2012, Yue connected with state consortia leaders and piloted a study in California,
Colorado and Maryland. Two co-leaders of the Pennsylvania State Consortium showed their
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interests of examining professional networks in their consortium. Yue started working with them
to conduct surveys and interviews, as well as attended one of their group meetings. In April 2014,
Drs. Alex Kudryavtsev and Marianne Krasny facilitated another online learning community --
the Urban Environmental Education Project-based Online Learning Community -- in which
participants co-authored on an eBook. Yue thought it was another great example of professional
development programs for environmental educators and decided to conduct research with this
group.
Thanks to the chance to participate in the North American Association for Environmental
Education (NAAEE) annual conference in October 2011, Yue started to build her professional
networks with scholars and environmental educators all over the world. Since then, she has been
attending each of the NAAEE annual conferences. In summer 2014, she did an internship with
NAAEE in Washington D.C. during which she helped organize workshops and write reports. She
co-authored State Environmental Literacy Plans, 2014 Status Report with Judy Braus and others.
Further, she helped to organize a weeklong workshop for Community Climate Change
Fellowship at the National Conservation Training Center in West Virginia, and met with 26
fellows and conducted a network and practice survey in this group.
Yue also presented her research and served on the international advisory committee for
the World Environmental Education Congress in Morocco in June 2013, and in Sweden in July
2015. She has been a reviewer for Environmental Education Research since she published her
first English article there. Through these opportunities, she continues enhancing her academic
skills and expands her professional networks internationally. In November 2015, Yue was
invited by the World Wildlife Fund to give a talk at the Nature Education Forum in Hangzhou,
China. That was her first formal environmental education conference in China; while there she
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met with hundreds of passionate educators.
In fall 2015, Yue visited Dr. Nicole Ardoin’s social ecological lab at Stanford University
as an exchange scholar. It was a wonderful experience to connect to diverse scholars working on
cross-disciplinary research. Also Yue audited Dr. Mitchell Stevens’ course and connected to
Lytics Online Learning Research Lab where she met several researchers working on online
learning especially Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
During Yue’s recent two academic visiting trips back to China, she connected with many
environmental education leaders, scholars and practitioners. Given the growing interests and
support for environmental education in China, Yue is planning to conduct international programs
and research to bridge environmental education communities in China and the US.
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This work is dedicated to all environmental educators.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to people, programs and organizations that supported me in completing
this dissertation.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor and committee chair Dr.
Marianne Krasny for her advice and support all the way through my PhD. I thank her trust in
recruiting me as her first Chinese student. Since I first came to Cornell in 2011, she has been
encouraging me to think deeply and critically by asking great guiding questions. Thanks to her, I
was brought into EECapacity project, based on which I conducted my research. The independent
study on online learning with her motivated my interests in online learning research. Further, Dr.
Krasny supported me to attend conferences to present my research and build professional
networks all over the world. During my dissertation writing process, Dr. Krasny patiently
reviewed my drafts again and again, and always provided helpful feedback immediately. She
constantly inspires me to think creatively and keep up the hard work. I would not have done this
dissertation without her.
I also want to thank my other committee members: Dr. Shorna Allred, Dr. Matthew
Brashears and Dr. Justin Dillon. Dr. Allred provided thoughtful comments on my research ideas
and proposals through Human Dimension Graduate Seminars. Through Dr. Brashears’ social
network theory course, I learned social network theories and applied social network analysis into
my research. Dr. Brashears also offered helpful suggestion for my data analysis. Dr. Dillon
broadened my views on professional development and communities of practice literature and
offered insightful suggestions for my dissertation.
This dissertation would not have been possible without EECapacity project. I thank Judy
Braus for her co-leadership on the project. Judy’ engaging speeches always inspired me to keep
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