Suchergebnisse

Purpose
– The paper aims to report on the experiences moderating an interdisciplinary graduate-level sustainability seminar. Initiated in Fall 2002, the seminar has explored diverse sustainability topics and reached approximately 150 faculty and students. The paper describes how the course shaped participants' perceptions of sustainability and influenced their viewpoints on interdisciplinarity. The paper discusses the implications of this seminar format for communicating about sustainability and provides suggestions for replicating the course at other institutions.


Design/methodology/approach
– Information about the course is complemented by analyses of the results of 15 in-depth interviews of students and faculty who have participated in the course.


Findings
– The course facilitated positive outcomes for students and faculty by expanding their familiarity with interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainability and environmental issues, increasing respect for other disciplinary perspectives, learning the basic vocabulary of disciplines outside their area of expertise, and strengthening collaborations between faculty. The course can be strengthened with more involvement from colleagues from the humanities and social sciences, and with attention to equal participation from all involved.


Originality/value
– The experience is unique in that it represents a nearly decade-long initiative to teaching about sustainability and biocomplexity from an interdisciplinary perspective. The innovative format, content, and pedagogical approach used for this course can be easily implemented in other disciplines. The learning community has facilitated other teaching and research endeavors. This model of sustainability education can advance understanding of complex environmental issues at a time when both interdisciplinarity and sustainability are becoming more common in higher education.

This study examined two potential mechanisms, competence and self-efficacy, that might account for the relationship between helicopter parenting and anxiety symptoms among female university students, and whether any mediating effects differed by parent gender. Structural equation modelling of data collected from 473 undergraduate students showed that both competence and self-efficacy mediated the association between paternal helicopter parenting and female university students' anxiety symptoms. No mediation effect was found for maternal helicopter parenting. A comparison between paternal and maternal effects revealed that they differed significantly from each other. Specifically, associations between helicopter parenting and female university students' competence and self-efficacy were much stronger for fathers than for mothers. Implications of the gender-specific findings are discussed in this article, and their importance for prevention and intervention are highlighted.