Kathryn Stevenson
Bio
Kathryn is an associate professor in the Parks, Recreation & Tourism Management department. She has a BS in Biology from Davidson College and PhD in Fisheries, Wildlife & Conservation Biology from NC State. She’s worked in residential outdoor education and in the high school classroom teaching science. Kathryn’s research and teaching is around environmental education, exploring how kids benefit from time in nature as well as how kids can contribute to environmental solutions in unique ways.
SHORT DESCRIPTION OF INTERESTS:
I’m interested in both how environmental education can benefits kids, as well as the unique role kids can play in community responses to environmental challenges. Most of my coastal work has been around the latter focus. When kids talk with adults, they seem to be able to change the timbre of the conversation so that issues are a bit more salient and politics don’t matter so much. I’m interested in how intergenerational conversations can bring communities toward consensus on how to address pressing environmental challenges, such as climate change and its impacts.
Publications
- Becoming the change we want to see: Aspirations and initial progress with diversity, equity, access, and inclusion practices to create welcoming environments and center community in informal science institutions , CURATOR-THE MUSEUM JOURNAL (2024)
- Nature or the outdoors? Understanding the power of language in elementary students' self-reported connection to nature , ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION RESEARCH (2024)
- Pushing toward systemic change in the Capitalocene: Investigating the efficacy of existing behavior prediction models on individual and collective pro-environmental actions in high school students , JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION (2024)
- Collaborative capacity-building for collective evaluation: a case study with informal science education centers , INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION PART B-COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT (2023)
- Conservation decision makers worry about relevancy and funding but not climate change , WILDLIFE SOCIETY BULLETIN (2023)
- Evaluating impacts of R3 workshops for first-time hunters at universities across the United States , WILDLIFE SOCIETY BULLETIN (2023)
- Family matters: intergenerational influences on children's agricultural literacy , JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION (2023)
- How a marine debris environmental education program plays to strengths of linguistically diverse learners , FRONTIERS IN EDUCATION (2023)
- How mixed messages may be better than silence in climate change education , (2023)
- Towards a unified definition of local food , JOURNAL OF RURAL STUDIES (2023)