Teaching and Fostering an Active Environmental Awareness Design, Validation and Planning for Action-Oriented Environmental Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

The paper deals with contemporary issues in Environmental education. The authors seek to bring a novel approach to schools in order to engage schools, children and families with the purpose of making them environmentally aware.

In such a way, the whole communities can take pro-environmental actions.

There is a saying: First sweep before your doorstep (locally) -- to act globally

The paper is well structured, clear and concise.

Of the importance is that the project was evaluated with all interest groups, what made improvements possible.

Although, there was a small sample of participants, they were equally distributed to all groups.

I hope the project leaders will really take participants' comments into account.

All the best with your interesting project, the reviewer.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Thank you for the comments and instructions.

We have now clarified our theoretical points of departure and more distinctly problematized the field of tension between political game frame versus issue frame.

We have made efforts to develop the description of the study.
As the validation study has a qualitative design and interviews have been used, it is not possible to present quantitative values for reliability based on co-assessor. Nor does the method allow to measure statistically significant differences between the different groups who were interviewed.

If the model receives recognition, the next step will be to implement the model and conduct a survey study of the effects and attitudes to environmental education. Then the number of participants will enable a quantitative study.

We are pleased with the reviewers' positive attitude to the article and their hope that it will be useful in the future.
We hope the changes made are sufficient.

Attaches the article where the extensions are highlighted.

Kind regards 
Peter Karlsudd and Daniel Thor

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I very much enjoyed this article. It is practical and describes an ambitious project to raise environmental and sustainability awareness in public schooling. This is no small undertaking. I especially appreciated the focus on the decision making around the design of the project. 

It would have been beneficial to understand what design approach the researchers used in creating the project. Stanford d-school offers strategies but the ideation and the experimentation- the collecting of feedback from stakeholders all reflect important aspects of designing thinking. 

51-76 - political game frame versus issue frame. This needs more explication.  I would like to see more explanation of how these models were arrived at - There are some thinkers who believe framing climate around individual responsibility is exactly what the big carbon emitters are happy to support as it focuses attention away from them an onto the average citizen's responsibility.  This needs to be problematized some more. 

lin 103 - 104 - well-being for all (Hopkins, Charles) may be another frame to cut to through the ESD vs EE divide. Nature cannot be lost in ESD when well-being for 'all' including ecosystems becomes a key. 

The work done by UNESCO - ESD Toolkit Mckeown, R. and Living Schools ( O'Brien & Howard) are all resources that have appeared to assist teachers  (line 146) 

I thought it was important to include teacher educators- pre-service teachers and students in the feedback survey. The authors may be interested in the work of http://eseinfacultiesofed.ca/

and opportunities to disseminate this important research to a wider audience. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Thank you for the comments and instructions.

We have now clarified our theoretical points of departure and more distinctly problematized the field of tension between political game frame versus issue frame.

We have made efforts to develop the description of the study.
As the validation study has a qualitative design and interviews have been used, it is not possible to present quantitative values for reliability based on co-assessor. Nor does the method allow to measure statistically significant differences between the different groups who were interviewed.

If the model receives recognition, the next step will be to implement the model and conduct a survey study of the effects and attitudes to environmental education. Then the number of participants will enable a quantitative study.

We are pleased with the reviewers' positive attitude to the article and their hope that it will be useful in the future.
We hope the changes made are sufficient.

Attaches the article where the extensions are highlighted.

Kind regards 
Peter Karlsudd and Daniel Thor

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, while your work has rich insights and provides some interesting proposals, it presents several important issues so that the article is not published: (1) Authors do not present a clear theoretical framework with testable theoretically-motivated hypotheses in their introduction. (2) Standardized questionnaires have not undergone any process of reliability. When performing the Interview, the profile and background of the experts interviewed are not shown. (3) There is no data matrix or scientific explanation of the coding and analysis process performed. When coding the results, the researchers involved must be identified, and the Kappa index and degree of agreement of the observers in each category need to be calculated.

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Thank you for the comments and instructions.

We have now clarified our theoretical points of departure and more distinctly problematized the field of tension between political game frame versus issue frame.

We have made efforts to develop the description of the study.
As the validation study has a qualitative design and interviews have been used, it is not possible to present quantitative values for reliability based on co-assessor. Nor does the method allow to measure statistically significant differences between the different groups who were interviewed.

If the model receives recognition, the next step will be to implement the model and conduct a survey study of the effects and attitudes to environmental education. Then the number of participants will enable a quantitative study.

We are pleased with the reviewers' positive attitude to the article and their hope that it will be useful in the future.
We hope the changes made are sufficient.

Attaches the article where the extensions are highlighted.

Kind regards 
Peter Karlsudd and Daniel Thor

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Accept in present form.