IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v12y2020i6p2501-d335820.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Performance Evaluation of Environmental Education Regional Centers: Positioning of Roles and Reflections on Expertise Development

Author

Listed:
  • Yu-Long Chao

    (Center for General Education, National Formosa University, Yunlin 632301, Taiwan)

Abstract

Emulating the practice of regional centers for expertise on education for sustainable development, a new type of environmental education (EE) centers with a multi-county jurisdiction was established in Taiwan. Reflections on the functional roles and EE expertise are crucial for these EE regional centers after implementing initiatives while trying to lead environmental educators. The operation team members of these centers and the practitioners and educators from EE institutions, facilities, and venues in Taiwan all participated in this investigation on the roles of these centers and evaluated their performance. Results show that at this initial stage of EE regional center development, the mixed views of center operation teams were averaged into a position close to the mean between a practice-orientated and a strategy-orientated methodology on a spectrum of the center roles. The evaluation results revealed a certain insufficiency in the experiences and expertise in EE of some EE regional centers. As these centers are endowed with a central status by policy to promote and guide regional EE, they need to learn from local grass-root environmental educators as well as other EE regional center personnel to substantiate their expertise, which could be achieved through practical experiences and co-research with local environmental educators.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu-Long Chao, 2020. "A Performance Evaluation of Environmental Education Regional Centers: Positioning of Roles and Reflections on Expertise Development," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-27, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:6:p:2501-:d:335820
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2501/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2501/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. María Angeles Murga-Menoyo, 2009. "Educating for Local Development and Global Sustainability: An Overview in Spain," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 1(3), pages 1-15, August.
    2. Chia-Wen Lee & Ching Li & Sung-Ta Liu, 2019. "Service Effectiveness of the Nature Centers for Sustainability of Environmental Education and Forest Policy Implications," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(9), pages 1-11, April.
    3. Walter, Alexander I. & Helgenberger, Sebastian & Wiek, Arnim & Scholz, Roland W., 2007. "Measuring societal effects of transdisciplinary research projects: Design and application of an evaluation method," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 325-338, November.
    4. Hoffman, Robert R. & Shadbolt, Nigel R. & Burton, A. Mike & Klein, Gary, 1995. "Eliciting Knowledge from Experts: A Methodological Analysis," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 129-158, May.
    5. John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, 1991. "Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 40-57, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Katerina Kabassi & Anastasia Papadaki & Athanasios Botonis, 2023. "Adapting Recommendations on Environmental Education Programs," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 15(1), pages 1-12, January.
    2. Katerina Kabassi, 2021. "Comparing Multi-Criteria Decision Making Models for Evaluating Environmental Education Programs," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(20), pages 1-17, October.
    3. Filippos Eliades & Maria K. Doula & Iliana Papamichael & Ioannis Vardopoulos & Irene Voukkali & Antonis A. Zorpas, 2022. "Carving out a Niche in the Sustainability Confluence for Environmental Education Centers in Cyprus and Greece," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(14), pages 1-17, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michael Kaethler, 2019. "Curating creative communities of practice: the role of ambiguity," Journal of Organization Design, Springer;Organizational Design Community, vol. 8(1), pages 1-17, December.
    2. Verena Brinks, 2016. "Situated affect and collective meaning: A community perspective on processes of value creation and commercialization in enthusiast-driven fields," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(6), pages 1152-1169, June.
    3. Francesco Rullani, 2005. "The Debate and the Community. “Reflexive Identity” in the FLOSS Community," LEM Papers Series 2005/18, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    4. Duniesky Feitó Madrigal & Alejandro Mungaray Lagarda & Michelle Texis Flores, 2016. "Factors associated with learning management in Mexican micro-entrepreneurs," Estudios Gerenciales, Universidad Icesi, vol. 32(141), pages 381-386, December.
    5. Guido Fioretti, 2007. "A connectionist model of the organizational learning curve," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 1-16, March.
    6. Paul Stock & Rob J.F. Burton, 2011. "Defining Terms for Integrated (Multi-Inter-Trans-Disciplinary) Sustainability Research," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 3(8), pages 1-24, July.
    7. Ankita Tandon & Unnikrishnan K. Nair, 2015. "Enactment of knowledge brokering: Agents, roles, processes and the impact of immersion," Working papers 183, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode.
    8. Andrea Morrison, 2005. "Inside the Black Box of ‘Industrial Atmosphere’: Knowledge and Information Networks in an Italian wine local system," Working Papers 97, SEMEQ Department - Faculty of Economics - University of Eastern Piedmont.
    9. Emmanuelle Vaast & Geoff Walsham, 2009. "Trans-Situated Learning: Supporting a Network of Practice with an Information Infrastructure," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 547-564, December.
    10. Weiling Ke & Lele Kang & Chuan-Hoo Tan & Chih-Hung Peng, 2021. "User Competence with Enterprise Systems: The Effects of Work Environment Factors," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 32(3), pages 860-875, September.
    11. Alvesson, Mats & Sveningsson, Stefan, 2011. "Management is the solution: Now what was the problem? On the fragile basis for managerialism," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 349-361.
    12. Cédric Dalmasso & Sebastien Gand & Frederic Garcias, 2017. "Enterprise social networks for the benefit of ambidextrous organisation? The case of a major oil company," Post-Print hal-03698884, HAL.
    13. Dupouet, Olivier & Yildizoglu, Murat, 2006. "Organizational performance in hierarchies and communities of practice," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 61(4), pages 668-690, December.
    14. Wirth, Steffen, 2014. "Communities matter: Institutional preconditions for community renewable energy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 236-246.
    15. Franke, Nikolaus & Shah, Sonali, 2003. "How communities support innovative activities: an exploration of assistance and sharing among end-users," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 157-178, January.
    16. Levent Yilmaz, 2011. "Toward Multi-Level, Multi-Theoretical Model Portfolios for Scientific Enterprise Workforce Dynamics," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 14(4), pages 1-2.
    17. Sarah Mokaddem & Sinda Mhiri, 2017. "Le Co-working comme alternative émergente pour promouvoir le « bien-être » au travail," Post-Print hal-01867742, HAL.
    18. Frédéric CREPLET, 2004. "Les Portails d’entreprise : une réponse aux dimensions de l’entreprise « processeur de connaissances »," Working Papers of BETA 2004-07, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    19. Schmid, Stefan & Schurig, Andreas, 2003. "The development of critical capabilities in foreign subsidiaries: disentangling the role of the subsidiary's business network," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 12(6), pages 755-782, December.
    20. Hong Jiang & Shuyu Sun & Hongtao Xu & Shukuan Zhao & Yong Chen, 2020. "Enterprises' network structure and their technology standardization capability in Industry 4.0," Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(4), pages 749-765, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:6:p:2501-:d:335820. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.