From experience to action: a comparative evaluation of pedagogical methods for environmental co-learning in non-formal settings

Environmental education (EE) in non-formal settings demands pedagogical methods that simultaneously build ecological knowledge, foster affective engagement and develop learners’ action competence. Yet comparative evidence on how specific methods differentially support these analytically distinct outcomes is scarce. This article evaluates six participatory methods—museum exhibition visit, immersive virtual reality, sensory culinary simulation, object-based elicitation, reflective drawing with concern mapping, and participatory performance—deployed across three citizen workshops on pollinator decline at the Nature and Archaeology Museum of Tenerife (MUNA, Spain) in October 2023 with 76 adult participants. A comparative qualitative design integrated observation logs, participant artefacts, evaluation surveys and facilitator memos; adaptive facilitation between iterations was treated as a design variable. No single method performed strongly across all three learning dimensions. Immersive and sensory methods generated the strongest affective engagement; object-based elicitation best surfaced tacit learner knowledge; participatory performance was the sole method generating collectively constructed action proposals, provided facilitation explicitly oriented groups towards action rather than diagnosis. Method sequencing along a cognitive-to-embodied-to-deliberative arc, and a ‘dystopian drift’ tendency in arts-based methods, emerge as critical pedagogical variables. Seven design principles for non-formal EE practice are derived.