Efforts to increase environmental awareness and engagement with school students have increasingly focused on interactive methods that rely on hands-on, experience-based, active learning rather than passive knowledge transmission (Ostman & Ohman, 2020). Such hands-on experiences are understood to stimulate students’ natural curiosity and caring and energise action that underlines change (Deci & Ryan, 2013), and they are important for supporting deep and critical environmental education. Building on this understanding, this research explored an engagement-focused educational programme called Dirt is Good (DiG) implemented within the school systems of England and Northern Ireland.

The DiG programme was built on the principles that caring and responsibility for the environment must come from within the young person, by aligning their interest and curiosity, personal values, and energy with environmental conservation behaviours to inspire long-term engagement with prosocial and pro-environmental values (Weinstein et al., 2015). Such autonomous motivation, which reflects both intrinsic motivation and personally held values, is self-driven, rather than being energised through external pressures or incentives, and results in enduring behaviour change alongside fostering well-being (Guay et al., 2016). The question of values was particularly important to the programme’s originators drawing on work that emphasises the importance of recognising norms and positive values held by others (Schwartz, 1992). The DiG programme thus provided an ideal opportunity to test how school-wide programmes, engaging students with value-led action through autonomous community engagement, would build intention to continue contributing to the social and environmental good.

The DiG programme was developed with several aims in mind, building from frameworks which highlight the roles of self-efficacy, interest and social connection, in motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2018; Maartensson & Loi, 2022). It recognises that pro-environmental behaviour change is driven by a complex interplay of internal and external factors, each with its own potential barriers to change (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002).

Faced with such complexity, the programme encouraged community effort between students by structuring activities as a shared pursuit undertaken in collaborating groups that negotiated their own purpose and thus meaning. Studies into young people’s attempts to regulate their worry in relation to climate change (Ojala, 2012; Wullenkord & Ojala, 2023) suggest that one of the more successful and enduring strategies is ‘meaning-focused’ coping, that is, dealing actively with a stressor even when that stressor is not fully controllable. From this perspective, young people who take positive environmental action will have little expectation of arresting climate change, but their action in line with their goals and values is positively associated with their subjective well-being (Ojala, 2012). The DiG programme encourages just such action, engaging positively with environmental concerns through project-based learning opportunities that have been shown in numerous studies to be effective both in terms of feelings of self-efficacy and depth of learning (Bramwell-Lalor et al., 2020; Jones et al., 2024; Öhman & Östman, 2019; Trott, 2020; Vare, 2021).

The current research examined outcomes of the DiG programme for students. By combining a statistical study with qualitative approaches, we sought to:

(a)    Clarify and illustrate quantitative findings, including how the DiG intervention worked for participants in the context of their wider sources of learning.

(b)    Develop further models not addressed in the quantitative measures and to critically examine quantitative findings. For example, we explored whether there were barriers, limitations, and challenges that were not measured or identified by quantitative findings. Doing so helped us to identify implementation strategies based on qualitative results.

(c)     Further understand how constructs may relate to one another within any emerging model.

The aim of the study was to test the effects of the DiG programme as compared to a control condition of students who did not undertake the programme, following students for a second measurement six months later. The study also sought to explore how any observed effects related directly to the DiG programme as compared with wider sources of learning. To do this we conducted two studies that, combined, constitute a mixed-methods approach that examined the effects of participating in the DiG programme in comparison to ‘treatment as usual’ at school, we explored how students’ experiences of DiG related to their values and prosocial and pro-environmental behavioural intentions, and we delved deeper into students’ specific experiences through in-depth interviews. Participants who took part in the quantitative study were 472 students recruited from schools within the U.K. Of these, 180 (38.1%) identified as female, 265 (56.1%) identified as male, 17 (3.6%) identified as another gender, and 10 (2.1%) preferred not to disclose their gender. The majority (total 81.4%) of participants were between the ages of 9 and 13 years, with a mean age of 10.65 years. Six months later, 242 students completed a second survey to examine sustained change as a function of the DiG Programme. Within the qualitative study, approximately 50 young people were involved in a first round of online semi-structured focus group discussions that took place online across four schools (one secondary and three primary) over a two-month period. In three of the schools, the participants were a self-selected group of between six and twelve individuals who had been involved in the programme to varying degrees. While entire classes had been involved in DiG activities, these students had volunteered to talk to the researcher over their lunchtime; it is plausible therefore that these students had a degree of prior commitment to the programme and its aims. One primary school chose to involve the whole class in the group interview, with teachers relaying messages to and from the researcher. A second round of online focus group discussions took place over January and February 2023 and involved many of the same students, although about a third were different due to the change in academic year. It proved impossible to reconnect with one of the primary schools due to timetabling difficulties. The studies received ethical approval from the University School Ethical Committee.

Quantitative findings showed that participating in DiG predicted both feeling more of an ‘empowered self’, that students could and had the skills to create change, and an ‘empowered community’, that students were together and aligned in creating positive change. The results for DiG predicting empowered self were sustained three months later, although the effects on DiG for empowered community were not. Students who participated in DiG six months earlier lost that sense of connected community, though they still felt themselves to be more empowered. Importantly, along with these beneficial experiential outcomes, we found that when compared to not doing so, participating in DiG predicted students intending to continue to act in ways that benefit other people and the natural world. These benefits of participation were sustained six months later, highlighting the lasting impacts of the programme on young people’s commitment to sustainability and positive change. The themes that emerged from the focus group discussions were broadly supportive of the quantitative results; they also provided detail and nuance that allowed us to delve deeper into those findings. Four broad themes emerged: 1. The role of the DiG programme and its relationship with other sources of learning in relation to the environment [this qualitative theme has links to the quantitative findings concerning: Participation in the DiG programme]. 2. Impacts in the affective domain [Links to: Empowered self and Empowered community]. 3. Positive action taken by young people [Links to: Autonomous motivation for change]. 4. Plans for the future [Links to: Intention to continue investing in prosocial and pro-environmental efforts].

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