Author(s)

JinMeng Zhang

Affiliation(s)

Qinghai Institute of Technology, Xining 816000, Qinghai, China.

Corresponding Author

JinMeng Zhang

ABSTRACT

Qinghai Province lies in western China on the northeastern margin of the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and is widely recognized for both ecological vulnerability and cultural diversity. Local environmental issues such as watershed security in headwater regions, grassland degradation, solid waste pressures linked to urbanization and tourism, and climate related hazards are not only biophysical problems but also questions of livelihoods, cultural practice, and governance. In many universities serving this region, the Introduction to Environmental Science course remains organized around generic textbook chapters and lecture centered delivery. Such arrangements often fragment students’ understanding of ecological systems and provide limited opportunities to practice evidence based inquiry, reasoning about trade offs, or communicating across cultural and linguistic differences. Drawing on place based education and the critical pedagogy of place, and on culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining perspectives, this paper develops a localized curriculum reform for the course and a coherent outcomes evaluation framework aligned with Education for Sustainable Development. The reform integrates local issue driven project units with core disciplinary concepts, adopts project based learning and authentic assessment as the primary instructional approach, and embeds participation supports intended to reduce inequities in multiethnic classrooms. The evaluation framework specifies measurable learning outcomes across conceptual understanding, environmental attitudes and literacy, systems thinking, evidence based decision making, and intercultural collaboration, and it proposes a mixed methods analytic strategy combining pre and post measures, rubric scored artifacts, classroom analytics, and qualitative analyses of interviews and learning journals. As a design based study, the paper reports the resulting curriculum architecture, task sets, and scoring tools as concrete products that can be adapted by universities in other multiethnic and environmentally sensitive regions.

KEYWORDS

Environmental science education; Place based education; Culturally responsive teaching; Multiethnic higher education; Qinghai Tibetan Plateau; Project based learning; Authentic assessment; Environmental literacy; Education for Sustainable Development

CITE THIS PAPER

JinMeng Zhang. Place based and culturally responsive reform of an introduction to environmental science course in Qinghai on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau: curriculum design and an outcomes evaluation framework. World Journal of Educational Studies. 2025, 3(8): 96-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61784/wjes3114.

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