Taking a Problem-Based Learning Approach to Teaching Ecopsychology

This paper emerges from our experience of delivering a course in ecopsychology to final-year undergraduate psychology and social science students at the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom. Our course in ecopsychology utilizes an inquiry or problem-based learning (PBL) approach alongside more traditional teaching methods, as we consider there to be a good fit between the subject matter of ecopsychology and the practice of PBL. In what follows we first offer a short account of why we wanted to teach ecopsychology in the first place, followed by an outline of the specific educational context in which the course is taught. We then describe how we have approached the structure, content, and delivery of the course more specifically, including the rationale and pragmatics of the problem-based learning component.