From environmental agency to risk literacy: cultivating action competence for sustainable development through safety education

Drawing on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) triadic theory of agency, this study surveyed 476 Taiwanese high-school students—10 of whom were then interviewed in depth—across traffic, water, and mountain safety contexts to see how their environmental agency actually took shape, reframed here as environmental risk literacy. What stood out was how unevenly the three dimensions developed: students drew most heavily on past experience (iterational agency, M = 4.38), while their capacity to judge situations in the moment (M=3.89) and to anticipate future risks (M = 3.66) lagged well behind (η² = .23). Those two weaker dimensions alone accounted for over half the variance in risk literacy (R² = .52). The interviews pointed to why: students wanted to learn by doing, not by being told, and how well a school’s curriculum was designed made a real difference in whether that agency developed at all.