Last century I studied some environmental education at York.
My professors walked the walk, and inspired us the way they would have
us inspire our students. You need inspiration to make change.
A decade later, I sometimes lose hope that we’ll change, and I have
to think a long way back to find that inspiration. Sometimes I think of
my environmental education prof, Leesa Fawcett, who says “hopelessness
hasn’t solved many problems.”
From the educator’s perspective, the question is: how to show young
students the real crisis we are in without fostering hopelessness? How
to inspire positive action? From my recollection, public schools and
inspiration don’t often mix.
The best environmental education in this province happens outside
the schools, judging from a recent workshop in Halifax by the
Environmental Education Caucus. There were very few teachers in
attendance. Most participants worked for government or non-profit
organizations. Most had more than one job, and conducted environmental
education with youth and the general population as part of their
multifaceted workloads.
“Teacher training in environmental education is still basically
non-existent,” Fawcett says. “No Additional Qualification courses, and
very few EE summer institutes.”
Nova Scotia’s environmental education guru, Alan Warner of Acadia
University, adds that institutional pressures limit what teachers and
visiting environmentalists can do in schools. Warner is the star
attraction at the Environmental Education Caucus’s workshop. “Our
challenge as environmental educators is the way we fit into systems and
what people want from us,” he tells participants.
The classroom setting, designed so that students can absorb
information from teacher and chalkboard, doesn’t help. Warner has spent
decades talking to young Nova Scotians about how they learn to care for
the environment. They don’t describe classrooms and they don’t describe
books.
As Fawcett puts it: “To be ecologically literate is overrated. It’s
often touted as the most important goal yet many oral cultures have
lived sustainably and ecologically.”
Young people emphasize the chance to actually participate in an
experience, to have real input into the discussion, to play games and
laugh, and to be given the time and space to reflect on both the
present and future of our planet.
Warner compares young students’ desires for input to rural nomads he
met in India.
“They had no adolescence; the kids make a meaningful contribution at
age 10, and they were engaged. If you ask young people to contribute
they will get engaged, instead of, as one student put it, ‘Learning and
learning and learning and never using it.'”
Such meaningful contribution is possible in our schools, as another
workshop participant showed with an anecdote. Her high school science
teacher saw her interest in the environment and helped her set up an
experiment to measure the effects of acid rain on shrimp. She ran the
experiment herself and gained an invaluable learning experience that
allowed her to contribute to the creation of new knowledge at a young
age.
This kind of inspired teaching, or facilitating, about environmental
issues is what Warner is getting at when he says educators have to fit
into systems, creatively. It is crucial they do this because, if
environmental education is adventurous, active, and gives youth the
space and respect they need to build their own communities (with each
other and with adults), it could transform the world we know into
something sustainable.
“Where students trust each other,” Warner says, “they can create a
new kind of cool. We had a group who gave themselves earthy names, like
Peace Lily, which became part of that group’s culture.”
This ability to reshape what cool is must come as a relief to the
environmental educators at Warner’s workshop, who identify overcoming
the coolness factor and peer pressure—that tendency of high school
students to be too cool for school—as one of their most daunting
challenges. Coincidentally, last week Michigan State University
published a study showing how peer pressure plays a large role in
fostering positive environmental behaviour in all age groups. If your
neighbours recycle, you are more likely to do the same.
Nicknames like Peace Lily are not cool in the public schools, I
know. It seems a new cool can emerge when students are allowed to put
their hyper-creative minds in action, not just to understand our
ecological crisis but to resolve it.
We need that to happen. As best-selling author and superstar
environmentalist Paul Hawken told this year’s graduating class at the
University of Portland, “Civilization needs a new operating system, you
are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.”
Send Chris Benjamin your realistic, but hopeful,
ideas on green education at chrisb@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.