I’d like your advice.
I was giving a talk a few weeks ago to Principals of the environmental education centres from across NSW about the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and particularly our high school program, Switched On Schools.
A woman came up afterwards and recognised me from when I was in high school in Newcastle and had attended a few environmental education days at the Newcastle Wetlands Environmental Education Centre. I remember in Year 8 painting a big collaborative mural of the wetlands, and going on a tour to see the wildlife and a few other hands-on activities. A few years after that, probably when I was in Yr 10, I returned to run workshops for younger kids on the same kind of education day. My workshop was about battery hens and cruelty to animals and it involved, in part, a mock cage that the kids could spend a few minutes in to experience what it would feel like to be a battery hen! Hope I didn’t scar anyone for life…
Those workshops at the Wetlands – attending them in Yr 8 and then helping run one in Yr 10, were probably my only formal ‘environmental education’ activities while I was in school. But I was receiving a large extra-curricular crash course during the campaign we were fighting to Save Stockton Bight, and through the environmental activities I was initiating at school with the school enviro group I started – recycling and revegetating an area of my school.
Now, of course, the level of environmental education in schools is much higher than when I was at school. There are countless reports (see this article from the SMH last week) of kids being the environmental ‘change agents’ in households because of what they bring home from school, and high school environment groups have blossomed since I was at school.
Yet there is still a lot of confusion about what best practice in environmental education is. I’ve met high school students whose ’student’ environment group was controlled by a teacher making them pick up rubbish every week. I’ve seen students roll their eyes at being told the science of what climate change is again and again, when what they really want to know is how we can solve it and what role they can play. And of course, there are just so many groups and individuals out there offering environmental education activities for students – it’s hard to know which ones are the best.
That’s why our Switched On Schools program has changed gear this year to focus on the AYCC’s ‘comparative advantage’ – building the political power of high school students as part of a generation-wide movement to solve climate change. We now work primarily with students directly (rather than school administrations), who sign up on our website, through word of mouth, or through our schools talks and conferences. We’re investing a large amount of effort, training and support in high school students because they are kicking ass already, and when they link across different schools, regions and states, they are going to be a force to change this country. Especially when we bring them all together – thousands of them – at Power Shift 2009 this July.
I was in Melbourne yesterday for my first meeting as a member of the Environment Minister’s National Council on Education for Sustainability. This is “a non-statutory body providing expert advice to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts and his Department on the effectiveness and profile of the Australian Government’s education for sustainability activities and education for sustainability issues generally.”
I’m interested in your stories, opinions and advice on sustainability education. I’ve written here about high schools but we’re also looking at vocational training, Universities, business and the community more broadly. Do you know any exceptional sustainability educators or organisations? What should the Federal Government be doing more of on environmental education? Please share!
4 Comments
I think the issue of sustainability is a little bit too difficult to kick off in kids with little to no idea of environmentalism. IMHO you can awaken environmentalism in kids by getting them involved in cleaning up an area infested with exotic species. Make it a year long project that allows them to find out all about the weeds that are there and the native plants that should be there. Get them involved in collecting native seed and propagating new plants (trees, grasses and bushes). Make the area as lovely as possible and as the kids grow they can point to individual plants and say I planted that, or I helped restore that area. Each year a new (say grade 4) class improves on the project and helps keep weeds from the cleaned areas. Kids love being outside and if it is not presented as a sit down and do as I say type of exercise most kids will love to participate in what they will undoubtedly view it as a break from the boring monotony of class room based learning. At a later stage the issue of maintaining a sustainable environment can be pursued by people who are at least aware of what environmentalism is about.
check out the NFP http://www.learning4achange.com.au They’ve developed learning materials and conversation processes and also seem to offer community training days in facilitation skills and arts based workshops among other things.
Your ideas around network learning bear up – there’s lots of research in the field of popular education and transformative learning that support where you are headed. Information on its own though doesn’t cut through (something that government doesn’t seem to really understand). Information does not equal education and even education does not equate to transformation since there is so much denial on so many levels about climate change and sustainability (think about those who do know lots but yet don’t actually modify their behaviour in any way) What can cut through is the use of the experiential and imaginal – like your kids in a battery hen cage idea. I don’t fully agree with two bob – there are all sorts of ways to bring young people (though I am thinking of teenagers which may be more AYCC’s market) along to the issues of sustainability ….actually much more encompassing than ‘environmentalism’. If we continue to pidgeon hole sustainability solely with environment we miss entire fields of human endeavour and ways of living that need to be encapsulated in sustainability learning – economy, ways of transport, housing etc etc etc. And while I have no expertise in teaching young kids it seems to me that if kids as young as 9 or 10 can delve into deep philosophical questions (as they do at Buranda school in Brisbane) then it’s not too much to facilitate learning about what it means to be sustainable and living within our means. Keeping it local (as two bob is kind of suggests) in terms of action is useful lest it all seem to huge to deal with.
My $0.02: Don’t make ambit claims for specific ’sustainability education’ on already crowded curricula. Rather, do all that you can to encourage study of mathematics and the fundamental sciences. Fundamental science (biology, physics, chemistry) is ultimately how environmental problems are identified, and also how their solutions are determined. More broadly, a scientifically literate populace is crucial to soundly based environmental debate and awareness.
By all means weave environmental issues into teaching of fundamental science. This is probably where the National Council for Education on Sustainability can do the most useful work. If you develop resources that biology, chemistry and physics teachers can easily incorporate to help deliver the outcomes required of them, they’ll run with them. But it’s got to be real, hard science, not touchy-feely consciousness raising.
Anna the biggest problem with have in schools, as in our broader society, is our inability to live with the environment, rather than to try and manage or conquer it. The type of eco-action projects you described are great, but don’t go anywhere near far enough in helping kids, or their teachers, understand what we need to do. Mark is right when he says that we need to avoid ambit claims, which means the issue needs to be tackled at a fundamental level.
The Centre For Ecoliteracy on the north coast of NSW is preparing to publish an educational manifesto which looks at how education needs to re-look at its purpose in today’s society, and how the whole system right across to teachers and students need to be adapting – at every level – from curriculum and pedagogy to learning environments and assessment practices. A massive endeavour. Until we have an Ecoliterate system of education though I would argue that all discussions about Sustainability need to go into the ‘good intentions but little outcome’ basket.
I can help you with resources and suggestions if you want to contact me through jlucasedu@gmail.com