“Behavioural science helps us understand how and why people do the things they do”, UN Secretary General António Guterres.

YUNGA in coordination with the World Food Forum’s Education Track and UN CC:Learn recently held a series of teacher labs on this topic, behavioural science. The labs brought together experts Dr. Susan Hanisch, Dr. Dustin Eirdosh, together who represent several organizations including Prosocial Schools, the University of Leipzig and the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, in Germany in addition to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. We were also joined by former high school science teacher and current PhD student Lisa Nehring from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. Together these experts shared ideas on how educators can improve the impact of their programmes through an understanding of human behaviour.

The two-lab series was held online, via zoom, on the 25^th of January and 1^st of February. Over 200 participants joined the sessions to gather insights and understanding of human behaviour and how these insights could improve the impact of environmental education programmes, globally.

“Teachers and Educators are experts in applied behavioural science. Teaching requires taking students perspectives into consideration, understanding their motivations and why they behave the way they do, it takes promoting cooperation and, predicting what might happen in certain contexts based on certain approaches”, Lisa Nehring.

The first session focused on defining the problems caused by our behaviours whilst also providing solutions to these problems through behavioural science, with examples on how these have been implemented. What we learned; behaviour is complex, it involves an understanding of an individual’s values and beliefs, it must take into consideration the local and global context in which the behaviour is taking place and a systemic viewpoint. Importantly, the field pulls from many different disciplines including psychology, economics, anthropology, the social sciences, and several other interconnecting fields. The problem we must address must then be looked at collaboratively, not from each individual standpoint but from a community level.

“A behaviour can be looked at as a response to a stimulus, or what we do”, Lisa Nehring.

An important element of any educational workshop is interactivity. During the labs participants had the opportunity to interact directly with our experts through breakout rooms. These moments allowed participants to share their own thoughts and ideas with our experts on each of the topics of interdisciplinarity, community science labs and behavioural barriers in education. The discussions then focused on using simple “nudges” and prosocial behaviour to decrease student burden and worry about the level of climate content. We also heard that community science labs can be used to increase student’s self-efficacy and empower them to take action within their schools or communities.

During this session Noemie Metais from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) also shared their work on the Little Green Book of Nudges, a resource of behavioural science case study examples from universities and educational campuses across the world. YUNGA also presented on their challenge badges and the behavioural change elements incorporated into all their resources. These challenge badges are valuable resources for any organization that delivers environmental education programmes to young people. YUNGA works directly with organizations, globally, to develop local context specific curricula on several thematic areas. Oisín (YUNGA) mentioned, one of the overarching goals for these resources is behaviour change and empowerment. The session closed with a Q&A segment, and the challenge to all participants to consider their own programmes and how behavioural science could increase their impact, this would be discussed further during the second session.

The second session focused on participants inputs and how they viewed behavioural science within their own programmes. This led to rich conversations that focused on the importance of localized approaches, that take into consideration local norms and contexts. Importantly, we also heard from Lisa Nehring on monitoring and evaluation.

“I have gained a deeper understanding of behavioural studies and its impact on the curriculum that we create”, “this already has me thinking about how we can integrate these resources”.

Fortunately, these discussions will continue as we have developed an online learning space for behavioural science. This space will feature inputs from our expert speakers, a resource library and continuing discussions. If you are interested in continuing these discussions, please join us, registration for this online space can be completed here - Behaviour Change Resource Group (office.com). Following this registration we can send you an invite to join. This group will also feature discussions on our upcoming resources, including the second edition of our behaviour change resource guide for teachers (first edition), behaviour change related to ecosystem restoration and how we can incorporate this into our new challenge badge on the UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration.

If you have any questions about any of the above resources or would be interested in being involved in the development of our behaviour change resource guide, please feel free to contact [email protected].