Education and the future of conservation: investigating conservation higher education teaching in the UK and Australia

To tackle the biodiversity crisis, conservationists must not only have a solid technical grounding in the ecological and social dimensions of conservation, but also be able to cope with uncertainty, handle complexity, navigate divergent perspectives and work across disciplinary boundaries. Numerous degrees and modules offered by higher education institutions aim to equip students with the knowledge and skills that they will need for a career in conservation, but there has been little empirical investigation of what conservation students are being taught. Prior research has also identified correlations between conservation professional’s educational background and their views on what the goals and approaches of conservation should be. Still, little is known about whether or how students’ conservation perspectives may change during their formal conservation training. This thesis presents four empirical studies into conservation higher education in the UK and Australia. I employ a mixed method approach using a combination of surveys, online content analysis and semi-structured interviews. Through integrating survey and content analysis data, I analyse teaching content delivered in 368 conservation modules and 62 conservation degrees at 95 universities. The thesis also includes data collected from 1122 students in 38 conservation modules and 18 conservation degrees at 40 higher education institutions. The first empirical chapter, Chapter 3, assesses the breadth and multidisciplinarity of content taught in conservation modules and degrees. A diverse range of subject-areas and topics were represented in the conservation syllabi reviewed, but content related to the biological sciences was most prevalent and few modules included teaching on material associated with the social sciences. These key findings indicate that the interdisciplinary nature of conservation practice is yet to be fully reflected in the conservation curriculum. Chapter 4 examines what skills educators aim to develop through their conservation teaching and the research methods covered in conservation higher education. I found few conservation modules explicitly aimed to develop non-academic skills essential for conservation careers and social sciences research methods teaching was absent from over half of the conservation degrees reviewed. The results indicate a mismatch between conservation teaching and the skills required for addressing complex conservation challenges. Chapter 5 examines students’ motives for studying conservation, their career aspirations, and differences in conservation perspectives by student characteristics. I found differences in conservation views associated with students’ career aspirations and educational specialism. Chapter 6 investigates changes in students’ conservation views using a pre-post survey design and uses linear mixed effect models to assess whether changes are associated with student and educational factors. This chapter revealed differences in students’ direction of change on three dimensions of conservation thinking associated with demographic and educational characteristics. Taken together, the results provide important insights into the status of conservation higher education and highlight differences linked to education factors that deserve greater attention. The thesis discusses implications for conservation educators and makes recommendations to further understand the role that higher education plays in shaping the future of biodiversity conservation.