Demetra Paraskeva-Hadjichambi

Cyprus Center for Environmental Research and Education | CYCERE · Environmental Education

As the global environmental crisis intensifies, there has been a significant interest in behavior change games (BCGs), as a viable venue to empower players’ pro-environmentalism. This pro-environmental empowerment is well-aligned with the notion of environmental citizenship (EC), which aims at transforming citizens into “environmental agents of cha...

Environmental Citizen Science (CS) initiatives are argued to provide a promising vehicle for involving citizens in the investigation of various socio-environmental issues. However, environmental CS initiatives have often been criticized for merely focusing on the achievement of their scientific goals and outcomes (science-oriented), rather than on...

Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) is one of the emerging, innovative, and promising trends in the educational field and plays an important role in adopting and promoting Environmental Citizenship in our societies. The current environmental crisis is rooted in a series of environmental problems (both local and global) many of which const...

Citizen science (CS) has shown tremendous popularity in recent years; however, there is still a lack of understanding of important aspects that determine citizens’ participation and involvement in CS initiatives. Although CS initiatives could serve as a means of promoting forms of participation that contribute to the democratization of science, lim...

In times of environmental crisis, Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) is argued to be of great significance in the development of secondary education students’ pro-environmentalism as environmental citizens. However, given that EEC is still emerging, there is a lack of empirical foundation on how environmental citizenship can be approache...

Environmental Citizen Science (CS) initiatives have been recognized over time as a promising way to engage citizens in the investigation and management of various socio-ecological issues. In this context, it has been often hypothesized that these CS initiatives may also contribute to the education and subsequent transformation of citizens into envi...

As we are living amid an unprecedented environmental crisis, the need to cultivate environmental citizenship in students intensifies. Teachers are considered as the main driving force in fostering students’ environmental citizenship. However, a critical question is whether teachers’ perceptions of environmental citizenship are well-informed. There...

It is commonly argued that, despite the tremendous resonance Citizen Science (CS) has shown in recent years, there is still lack of understanding of important aspects defining citizens’ participation and engagement in CS initiatives. While CS initiatives could provide a vehicle to foster forms of participation contributing to the democratization of...

As we are living amid an unprecedent environmental crisis, the need for schools to empower students into environmental citizenship is intensifying. Teachers are considered as the main driving force in fostering students’ environmental citizenship. However, a critical question is how teachers conceive environmental citizenship and whether their perc...

Environmental Education (EE) has been established in Austria’s education institutions since the 1970s and is integrated in various subjects of the curriculum. The overall aims are to understand the global context of individual actions with linkages to the environment and climate and to influence behaviour in an environmentally-friendly way. In the...

In order to achieve a sustainable society, a citizen must be supported in overcoming any important gaps or challenges. Preparing people for Environmental Citizenship and Education for Sustainability shows coincidences in some dimensions and differences in others. However, within its definition, Environmental Citizenship has a strong emphasis on the...

In this chapter, we will consider the relationships between values, beliefs and Environmental Citizenship. The role of personal values, value orientations and environmental beliefs in explaining pro-environmental actions and behaviour is widely explored. It is already acknowledged that self-enhancement (egoistic and hedonistic) values are less pred...

Conceptions of Environmental Citizenship are core to models of sustainability. Such contested conceptions raise historically significant questions associated with the rights of the individual and the responsibility of the community to the environment. Attitudes towards sustainability beg questions of models of citizenship ranging from compliance th...

Non-formal education is an integral component to lifelong learning and its aim is for young people and adults to acquire and maintain the skills and competencies necessary to adapt to a continuously changing environment. Non-formal education implements different learning activities and is supplementary to formal education, taking place outside, but...

Contemporary and urgent environmental problems need to be addressed through Education for Environmental Citizenship. This chapter proposes a specific model of Education for Environmental Citizenship which includes the outputs, dimensions, scales and spheres of Environmental Citizenship. A specific pedagogical approach is elaborated which can promot...

Environmental citizenship is very important in sustainability research. The criticality of the observed environmental crisis requires capable and competent environmental citizens who can act as agents of change to achieve sustainability. This research presents the validation of the Environmental Citizenship Questionnaire (ECQ) for assessing the env...

This open access book is about the development of a common understanding of environmental citizenship. It conceptualizes and frames environmental citizenship taking an educational perspective. Organized in four complementary parts, the book first explains the political, economic and societal dimensions of the concept. Next, it examines environmenta...

Climate change is expected to substantially alter temperature and precipitation regimes, leading to more intense and more frequent extreme rain events, droughts, reduced air quality and consequently negatively influences biodiversity and ecosystems. The importance of protecting and improving ecosystems for reducing disaster risk started to receive...

Flooding is a wide-range natural hazard that noticeably damages property, people, and the environment. In the context of climate change, the integration of spatial planning with flood-risk management has gained prominence as an approach to mitigating the risks of flooding. Land use is regulated through various mixes of top-down laws, regulations an...

The European Network for Environmental Citizenship (ENEC)– funded as a COST Action (CA16229 - Horizon 2020)–brings together more than 120 experts from 37 countries with the objective to improve the understanding, the practice and the assessment of Environmental Citizenship in Europe and the participating countries. Environmental Citizenship has bee...

Education for Environmental Citizenship, as was defined by ENEC (2018), has a lot to contribute to the education of the future environmental citizens. The Education for Environmental Citizenship pedagogical approach (Hadjichambis & Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, 2020) is an integrated and comprehensive tool which includes stages and steps designed to promo...

Flooding is a wide-range natural hazard that noticeably damages property, people, and the environment. In the context of climate change, the integration of spatial planning with flood-risk management has gained prominence as an approach to mitigating the risks of flooding. Land use is regulated through various mixes of top-down laws, regulations an...

The European Network for Environmental Citizenship (ENEC) – funded as a COST Action (CA16229-Horizon 2020) – brings together more than 130 experts from 38 countries with the objective to improve the understanding, the practice and the assessment of Environmental Citizenship in Europe and the participating countries. Environmental Citizenship has b...

Η Εκπαίδευση στις Φυσικές Επιστήμες αποτελεί σημαντική διάσταση των στόχων της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης για την Υπεύθυνη Έρευνα και Καινοτομία (ΥΕΚ). Ωστόσο, η ΥΕΚ δεν αποτελεί έμφαση της διδασκαλίας της βιολογίας και ελάχιστοι εκπαιδευτικοί βιολογίας έχουν εμπειρία στην ενσωμάτωση της ΥΕΚ στην καθημερινή εκπαιδευτική πρακτική. Η εργασία αυτή εξετάζει τον...

Science education is an important dimension of the European Commission’s Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) objectives; however, RRI is not an explicit focus of biology teaching and few biology teachers have experience in integrating RRI in classroom practice. This study examines the impact of a three 80-minute RRI and active citizenship mod...

Background To understand attitudes and behaviours of adolescents towards antibiotics, antimicrobial resistance and respiratory tract infections. Design Qualitative approach informed by the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were undertaken. We aimed to inform the development of an intervention in an internatio...

National science curricula worldwide are being reformed to respond to emerging societal challenges, such as climate change and biotechnology, and Cyprus could not be an exception, as a reform effort has been ongoing for the last several years. This study examines the national biology curriculum at the lower secondary level of education in Cyprus to...

Despite the importance of understanding how the human reproductive system works, adolescents worldwide exhibit weak conceptual understanding, which leads to serious risks, such as unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Studies focusing on the development and evaluation of inquiry-based learning interventions, promoting the knowledg...

The present study incorporated a scaffolding decision making procedure on an authentic environmental socio-scientific issue and investigated how students’ decisions are intertwined with their values. Computer-based activities provided necessary information and allowed for the consideration of multiple aspects of the issue, the study of the effects...

During the last decades, current consumption patterns have been recurrently blamed for rendering both the environment and our lifestyles unsustainable. Young children are considered a critical group in the effort to make a shift towards sustainable consumption (environmentally friendly consumption). However, young people should be able to consider...

One of the goals behind the design of inquiry-based learning environments is to support the development of self-regulated learners. The concept of external collaboration scripts scaffolding the learning process can contribute to this goal. This case study investigated the role of two different collaboration scripts in students’ collaborative help-s...

The recent educational reformation in Cyprus moved education about sustainability to the forefront of environmental education, aspiring young people to adopt more sustainable lifestyles and protect the environment. Considering that understanding ecological concepts and building positive environmental attitudes are basic ingredients in learning abou...

This case study investigated students' collaborative help-seeking and their teachers' help-giving behaviors in inquiry-based learning. Data from two pairs of middle-school students, using two different scaffolding scripts, and from their biology teacher, were collected and analyzed. The following research questions were pursued: How does each colla...

The recent educational reform in Cyprus moved education about sustainability to the forefront of environmental learning. The present study examines the impact of an earth education program, Earthkeepers, on children's ecological understandings, environmental values and attitudes, and behaviour. The program was implemented during two consecutive yea...

Investigating children's beliefs and values toward threatened biodiversity can contribute to their understanding about nature and to the prevention of sociopolitical issues that may emerge when nature policy is being implemented. This study investigates children's beliefs about threats to plants, the personal values associated with conservation, an...

The use of local Mediterranean food plants is at the brink of disappearance. Even though there is relatively abundant information on inventories of wild edible taxa, there is also a crucial need to understand how these plants are consumed and when and how these consumption phenomena change over time and place around the Mediterranean. Additionally,...

Within the scope of the European project RUBIA (ICA3-2002-10023), research has been performed on the traditional use and handling of plant species in several Mediterranean countries, Albania, Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Italy, Morocco, and Spain. This paper synthesises the chief results related to the medicinal utilization of those plants. The informat...

The use of local Mediterranean food plants is at the brink of disappearance. Even though there is relatively abundant information on inventories of wild edible taxa, there is also a crucial need to understand how these plants are consumed and when and how these consumption phenomena change over time and place around the Mediterranean. Additionally,...

Wild edible plants of the Paphos and Larnaca countryside of Cyprus. The species list of wild edible plants consumed in Paphos and Larnaca countryside of Cyprus including the plant parts used, type of preparation, site recorded, number of records and herbarium specimen number.

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