Inspiring Youth Sustainability Leadership and Creating Sustainable Schools: Explorations of extracurricular programming and university-community partnerships

This research was motivated by concern for the wider ecology of our planet, the necessity for a cultural shift towards sustainability, and curiosity about roles psychologists could play in creating this shift. It was based around two real-world projects within the interlinked fields of inspiring youth sustainability leadership and creating sustainable schools. The first project involved a university-community partnership between my research team from the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland and a local co-educational secondary school, Western Springs College (WSC). This action research endeavour was focused around achieving WSC’s strategic goal of working towards sustainable practices in all areas of school life. My research team essentially facilitated the project for two years, and supporting the school’s appointed student environmental leaders was a central feature of our approach. The second project was a participatory evaluation of a non-school-based extracurricular student sustainability leadership programme, Make a Difference (MAD), run by Auckland Council’s environmental education team. The evaluation involved myself working collaboratively with MAD coordinators and youth participants to develop an understanding of the programme’s theory of change, its developmental and action-related outcomes for young people, and options for ongoing monitoring and evaluation. In this thesis, I present four papers based on my engagement in these projects. The first two draw on the MAD evaluation. Paper one profiles the participatory methods utilised to develop MAD’s theory of change, and offers an interpretation of how this initiative inspires and supports youth sustainability leadership. Paper two is a case study of the MAD programme’s initial three-day residential retreat, and explores the key elements that may underlie its transformative potential. The latter two papers focus on the experiences of the core people driving change within the WSC sustainability project. Paper three is a phenomenological, authoethnographic study on my research team’s guiding principles, our experiences applying these principles within the project, school members’ impressions of our approach, and lessons learned from the reflective process. Paper four focuses on the perceptions, experiences and practices of WSC’s appointed student environmental leaders, and draws attention to the uniqueness of environmental leadership compared to more traditional forms of student leadership (i.e., sporting and cultural). As a whole, this thesis contributes insights about the transformative potential of non-school-based (MAD) and school-based (WSC) extracurricular programmes for inspiring youth sustainability leadership. It also contributes a novel approach to creating sustainable schools via university-community partnerships. I conclude with a discussion of meta-themes from the papers, implications for practitioners, and an invitation to psychologists to engage in emancipatory forms of research.