Cultivating Ecological Citizens: An Integrative Framework for Inclusive, Experiential Environmental Education in Nigerian Universities

Abstract

Environmental education across Nigerian universities remains predominantly informational: students are told about environmental problems and expected, on that basis alone, to develop the attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours that address them. This paper argues that this model rests on an outdated and largely discredited assumption — that environmental knowledge reliably produces pro-environmental behaviour — and proposes an integrative alternative grounded in experiential, place-based, and critically reflective pedagogy. Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour, Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, Orr’s ecological literacy and Grue- newald’s critical pedagogy of place, Freire’s critical pedagogy, universal design for learning, Schwartz’s norm activation model, and Gifford’s psychological barriers to pro-environmental action, this paper develops a framework addressing three distinct but interlocking gaps in Nigerian environmental education: the absence of experiential and inclusive pedagogy attentive to diverse learners and indigenous ecological knowledge, the psychological and normative barriers that prevent environmental awareness from translating into behaviour, and the disciplinary tendency to treat environmental education as content delivery rather than capacity-build- ing for citizenship. The paper grounds its argument in confirmed empirical anchors including Kaiser, Wolf- ing, and Fuhrer’s foundational theory of planned behaviour study, the New Ecological Paradigm scale, a real University of Ibadan environmental awareness study, a genuine, if more cautious than commonly cited, systematic review of environmental education outcomes for conservation, and a documented African social work precedent for indigenous knowledge integration in environmental practice from Zimbabwe, published in a journal indexed across AJOL, DOAJ, and Scopus. The paper advances six testable propositions concern- ing experiential pedagogy, inclusive design, and normative barriers to pro-environmental behaviour among Nigerian university students, and concludes with recommendations for restructuring environmental education around experiential, inclusive, and psychologically realistic foundations.