Despite the increasing square footage of green buildings worldwide, green building expertise remains largely in the domain of building industry professionals. However, the performance of and advocacy for green buildings would benefit from a green building literate general public. Green building education is an expanding frontier for STEM education and can create opportunities to integrate science and environmental literacies into the study of everyday environments. Few resources exist, however, to help STEM educators incorporate green building themes into the science classroom. The work here developed educational tools for connecting green buildings and science education through a multi-step process. An interdisciplinary literature review yielded a series of frameworks that were improved through two focus groups with science and environmental educators and built environment professionals. The result of this process is a toolbox of conceptual frameworks for educators interested in using a systems-based approach to teach about green buildings as sites for complex interactions between human activity and Earth systems. The work here first leverages the broad definition of environmental literacy (knowledge, skills, affect, and behavior) to advance a working definition for “green building literacy.” Next, major domains of green building knowledge are developed and linked to the Next Generation Science Standards. Green building literacy has been an ill-defined term and green building themes have not been rigorously connected to science and environmental education. The work here provides a foundation for promoting green building literacy through K-12 STEM education. The educational tools developed through this process can be used as a starting point for lesson planning to catalyze green building education in a variety of formal and informal settings.

The ‘Teaching Green School Building’ is an emergent type of school building that attempts to engage building users with environmental issues in buildings. Architectural interventions in these buildings range from signage to interactive touch screens to gardens and demonstration kitchens that foster educational programmes about sustainable food. The result can be a building that offers informal education, support for formal environmental education, and, overall, a chance for students to embody sustainable living in their daily lives at school. To date, this type of building has been weakly theorized, and the relationship between architectural interventions and environmental education largely unexplored in the literature. This literature review weaves together theories that connect the physical environment with human factors. In particular, research in environmental education, museum studies, conservation psychology and architecture illuminates ways in which buildings can support environmental education and with tactics that go well beyond the convention of informational signage on the wall. The result of the literature review is a framework that points to design patterns that extend from passive to active, individual to collective, and formal to informal. This framework can inform the design, use and evaluation of school buildings designed with pedagogical intent.

Teaching Green Buildings (TGBs) are designed to engage building users with the sustainable features of the building and offer unique opportunities to deliver environmental education (EE) through multiple channels. This study examines three case study TGBs across the United States. We present results from a mixed-methods study involving a youth survey (n = 311), youth Photovoice project (n = 29), and focus groups and interviews with adult key informants. We sought to understand how school facility design, school culture, curriculum, and teachers as role models provide multiple channels for EE, with a particular interest in the physical built environment of these three unique schools. Basic green building knowledge and environmentally responsible behaviours were detected at all three schools. We found, however, that two of the case study schools, despite the access to TGBs, were not communicating sustainability through diverse channels, and the EE outcomes for students were disjointed and tepid. The third and most established TGB offered sustainability messaging through numerous channels and the result for students was a more holistic and connected understanding of green buildings within the larger ecological context.

Amid increasing interests in social metrics within green buildings, this work focuses on buildings designed to enhance environmental education, here called “Teaching Green Buildings” (TGBs). This study examines one school building at three points in time before and after the move into a new construction TGB. Middle school students here and at a local, comparison Non-Green School (N = 264) took a survey measuring outcomes of green building knowledge (GBK) and environmentally responsible behaviors (ERBs). Regression results showed that GBK is significantly higher for students in the Green School compared with the Non-Green School, but is not increasing over time for students at the Green School. No differences were detected in ERBs across schools or time, and it was found that school practices, more than the green building itself, were pivotal in student choices to conduct ERBs at school.

The choice to create or renovate museum buildings to green building standards is a growing trend for science museums. With access to green facilities comes the potential to extend informal science learning into the three-dimensional architectural environment. To examine how and if museums with green buildings interpret their buildings for the public, this study used photographs systematically taken by researchers in eight science museums across the United States. Results show that recycling, water, energy, green materials, and eco-landscaping were the top five green building themes interpreted by museums. Moreover, all museums use the passive strategy of educational signage to communicate green building themes, though several museums attempted to provide more active, hands-on learning opportunities. The analysis additionally uncovered a series of distinct strategic choices museums made concerning centralized versus decentralized displays, media types, passive versus active engagement, and targeting a range of visitor outcomes from green knowledge to behaviors. The potential for enhancing green building education in museums with certified green buildings is discussed.

Purpose: This study examines a general education, hands-on and 100 per cent online laboratory course to better understand the prospects for fostering green building literacy through experiential online education.Design/methodology/approach: The mixed-methods research design included pre- and post-course surveys (n= 42) together with semi-structured interviews mid-semester (n= 10) and four to six months post-course (n= 5). Data were collected for two semesters.Findings: Students experienced significant increases in green building knowledge and skills, environmental sensitivity and pro-environmental behaviors from the beginning to the end of the course. Qualitative results indicate that the hands-on laboratory assignments were the primary pedagogical interventions affecting change. Interviews four to six months after the course revealed that motivation, convenience and supportiveness of the context were key factors impacting the pro-environmental behaviors that were maintained versus those that were discontinued by students when the course was over.Practical implications: This paper shares effective approaches used to deliver an online course with hands-on laboratories that lead to positive increases in sustainability knowledge and behaviors stretching beyond the semester.Originality/value: While online and experiential learning are both well-studied themes in higher education, very little empirical work examines experiential online learning, and this is particularly the case for online laboratory courses. The work here contributes to the understanding of general education online laboratories that are designed to increase knowledge and behavior change through hands-on experiential learning techniques.