Ithaca College

 Praneeta Mudaliar, Meaghan McElroy, and Jake Brenner co-authored an article titled, “The futility and fatality of incremental action: motivations and barriers among undergraduates for environmental action that matters” in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. This article is based on data collected by 93 undergraduate students enrolled in an ICC class called Environmental Crisis: Causes and Solutions that Praneeta and Jake teach. Students conducted 143 interviews on the pro-environmental actions of their peers at Ithaca College as well as the motivations and barriers to pro-environmental actions. 

70% of students engage in short-term, incremental actions and only 3% of students engage in long-term transformative action such as coordinated political mobilization. However, students are aware of the inadequacy of their actions and express deep frustration with the status quo that favors powerful corporations. The authors also present a new method called, “collaborative coding,” where students don’t just collect data, but also code data together. Collaboratively coding data enables students to see that their peers are just like them in feeling the futility of incremental actions alongside the urgency for transformative change. Collaborative coding is also a high impact practice, where research is not just available to individual students, but an entire class gets the opportunity to participate in the research process. Such high impact practices can provide benefits in retention, graduation, deep learning, and build self-efficacy for undergraduates. 

Please contact Praneeta Mudaliar (pmudliar@ithaca.edu) for the pdf and/or more information.