ecotypes spring 2022 prep & updates

[James Proctor]

Dear all, you received my email of Dec 06 (also below) inviting your spring 2022 course participation in EcoTypes. Here are a few updates and reminders:

• If you do plan to participate, and wish to retrieve your students' (anonymous) data, please be in touch with me to confirm an institutional code they'll select toward the end of the survey. I recommend a simple code students can readily find in the dropdown list.
• We will be testing some new features this spring that give your students opportunities to go into greater depth on axes, themes, and EcoTypes, all part of a COIL I and international collaborators are developing. If interested, feel free to submit the contact form or simply email me...I'll provide more details in time.
• You will notice that the EcoTypes survey now includes an additional page of pilot statements we are statistically evaluating for eventual inclusion. These statements are related to four axes: the existing Nature axis, and three possible axes on Animals, Cities, and Economies. When finalized following this spring, each of these axes will include just two statements, like other axes on our current brief survey.

Thank you, and feel free to be in touch as needed.

Regards,

Jim P.

***

Dear colleagues, as we all work hard to finish up our fall terms, I welcome you to consider incorporating EcoTypes into your spring 2022 plans. If you haven't yet used it, EcoTypes involves a free online survey and associated resources for your students to explore a wide range of environmental ideas. If you have used it in past, EcoTypes was extensively modified in summer 2021, and now the survey is shorter, delivers an immediate online report, and results in clusters of ideas also called EcoTypes, with names such as Small is Beautiful, Ecoscience, and Indigenous Justice. There are also opportunities for cross-national interaction, with current collaborators from France, India, and U.K.

If interested, here are the general and instructor FAQ pages, and feel free to contact me.

***

[James Proctor]

Hello, EcoTypes colleagues! In addition to the below updates, I've now collected others on an EcoTypes page titled What's New in '22?...here's what you'll find there:

• A quick summary of our fall 2021 cross-national collaboration findings
• Three new candidate axes: Animals, Cities, and Economies
• Focus on Frameworks, an upcoming initiative building on EcoTypes

Happy to take questions/comments via reply or the contact form. Remember the Instructor FAQ has answers as well!

Best wishes to all as our instructional terms unfold...let's keep hope alive for 2022.

Regards,

Jim P.

[James Proctor]

Dear colleagues, more in-progress EcoTypes statistical results to share with you and students this term, all added to the same What's New in '22 page as below:

• We now have approximately 400 responses to the new candidate axes, so I ran a factor analysis and shared with you the results in the page section titled "Coming later spring 2022: Animals, Cities, and Economies axes." You'll see not only that these three candidate axes contribute to the existing themes of Place and Action; you'll also see how *all* axes contribute to the three themes, which may help you demystify them for your students.
• When I ran the analysis, I also did a simple set of descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) for all 18 axes; they are in a table in a new section of the What's New page. I highlighted some especially strong means and standard deviations; again, these may spark some interesting conversations and comparisons among your students. Do bear in mind that these descriptive stats are not drawn from a representative sample!...but it might be helpful to know that approximately 4 out of 5 respondents in this sample live in the U.S., and I suspect many were your students taking the survey.

I hope you will find these numbers to be of instructional use! Do be in touch if questions.

Regards,

Jim P.