Children were taken hostage in Russia, thousands died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and bombs were detonated in Palestine and Israel. All of these events have occurred while I have been an environmental educator at IslandWood. How these events define my role as an environmental educator may seem obscure at first, but they are actually paramount to my decision to devote my life to this career.

I began to question the value of environmental or outdoor education last September when I read reports of the hostage crisis in Russia. Children were sacrificed for political gain while I was preparing to teach children about ecosystems.  My career choice and what was needed in the world did not seem to be congruent. I could not see how what I was doing was alleviating suffering and dissipating hate. I wondered why it is important to teach children the abiotic parts of an ecosystem when there is a current of hate running through our society. Through this ongoing monologue I realized what role I want to play in environmental education. I want to help children build relationships and a sense of community in hopes that they will leave their experience with me a bit more likely to make positive choices.

I do not believe that children should grow up thinking that the environment is the world’s greatest problem, and it is their duty to save it, which some refer to as the ‘gloom and doom’ approach. Personally, I think that social problems have greater potential to exterminate humans long before we have a chance to kill the planet. The point of this polemic is that I believe children should be taught the value of treating everything with respect, which includes the natural world.

My role as an environmental educator is to teach about the environment, both natural and human-made, and to help others see and value the relationships in and between both. At IslandWood I spend a significant part of 4-day School Overnight Program discussing communities, those in a watershed or ecosystem, our group’s and their home community. Mornings begin with a focus question, which I have altered so that they are broader and can have answers that apply to the students’ own life. For example, “What is an ecosystem?” becomes “What is a community?,” so that human and natural communities can be discussed. The final question of the week “What can I do to make the world a better place?” can have myriad answers that connect their experiences at IslandWood and their lives back home.

I think that the experience of being outdoors in a small community can change people’s lives in extraordinary ways. The setting removes familiar pressures and attitudes, the people often feel freer to be themselves, and the experience is interesting. The combination of environmental education in the outdoors has had a great role in bringing me to this point in my life. I have lived, worked and studied in small communities in nature and believe that I am a better person because of it. I have facilitated these experiences for others and am consistently amazed by its impact. Patience, tolerance, respect and gratitude are virtues that can grow from environmental education, and I believe that these virtues are what is needed to save the world.

Julie Corotis is a graduate student of the IslandWood School on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Share on Facebook

No Student Left Indoors is your opportunity to learn and teach about our planet by helping your students to create a field guide to your schoolyard. Whether you’re a nature buff or nature-phobe, a literary genius or writing impaired, artistically talented or one who can’t draw a straight line with a ruler, and teaching gift or challenged students in an urban, suburban, or rural school—you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of this before.
You’ll learn:

• Who can participate in and benefit from a schoolyard study
• What those benefits are
• Where to look for nature in your schoolyard
• When to conduct your studies
• How to teach students to discover, observe, and record the nature in your schoolyard
• Why everyone is talking about No Student Left Indoors

This is a project for a class, grade, or entire school. It can be a long-term project based on inquiry, investigation, and hands-on learning, The project connects science, language arts, history, creative arts, and technology.

Available from http://www.takeawalk.com/
or through Acorn Naturalists http://www.acornnaturalists.org

Share on Facebook

by Mike Weilbacher

With the new wave of interest in the environment, will we finally give students the tools they need to become environmentally literate citizens?

In just a few weeks, high school seniors all around the United States will walk proudly across stages, hoisting their diplomas as they graduate from formal K–12 education. As their teachers, we’ll look on with some wistfulness, for the world into which they are graduating—one of spiraling financial crises coupled with huge international challenges—is vastly different from the one in which they started their senior year only 10 months ago.

But wait, it gets worse. If you place your finger on the pulse of the planet, this is what you’ll discover: global surface temperatures rising, glaciers melting, oceans warming, sea levels rising, rain forests burning, coral reefs dying, old-growth forests disappearing, deserts spreading, the world’s population increasing, and species vanishing at the highest rates since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

In short, the ecology that underpins our economy is also collapsing. And the solutions to this challenge elude not only most of our graduates, but also us—their teachers, administrators, and parents.

Will our graduates be ready for these new realities? Will they confidently stride into this world as college students, workers, voters, consumers—in short, as competent, caring adults capable of making good decisions on the pressing issues of the day?

Environmental Ignorance

Forty years ago, in the first issue of the Journal of Environmental Education, William B. Stapp (1969) defined the goal of the nascent field of environmental education as producing a citizenry that “is knowledgeable concerning the biophysical environment and its associated problems, aware of how to help solve these problems, and motivated to work toward their solution” (p. 30).

Today, a new U.S. president actively seeks approval from the American people for repairing the economic collapse while preventing the ecological one. There will be fierce pressure on President Obama to forego environmental projects in lieu of economic ones. Have the past 40 years of environmental education met Stapp’s challenge and created the environmentally literate citizenry we need to negotiate the coming trade-offs?

In a word, no.

A typical high school student is aware of environmental issues, has discussed and debated climate change or rain forest loss in some class sometime, and might have bumper-sticker answers to lapel-pin questions. But do our students know where the trash goes when it leaves their house? The leading source of greenhouse gas emissions? Why we recycle? (Glass and aluminum, after all, are not rare resources.) If you ask a group of students what we can do to combat the warming trend, several will chime in that we need to remove chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from hair spray. (Many high schoolers conflate global warming with ozone depletion and haven’t been told that CFCs were removed from the market 20 years ago.)

My organization surveyed high school students on these questions and more and discovered that although students are overwhelmingly “pro-environment,” they possess remarkably little information about breaking environmental issues. One small example: We asked them to name one bird they can identify by song. The leading answer? None. If local birds disappear from the landscape because of extinction, or arrive three weeks late because of warming climates, it’s possible that no one will notice.

Oh, there are numerous bright spots in the environmental education movement, but progress is hardly keeping up with the increasingly urgent issues that face us today. When Stapp coined his definition four decades ago, the United States was riding a wave of interest in the environment triggered by the Santa Barbara oil spill, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, Lake Erie being declared biologically dead, and charismatic birds like eagles and peregrine falcons vanishing. As we addressed these issues, the wave crested, and interest in ecology quickly ebbed.

Today, even though an interest in green ideas is resurging, the issues are far more global, complex, and intertwined with politics. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels currently exceed 385 parts per million, almost 40 percent higher than pre–Industrial Revolution levels, and they are rising every year. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean is changing dramatically as the Arctic warms more quickly than anyone expected, and our graduates may see an ice-free polar cap in the summer in their lifetimes.

An International Union for the Conservation of Nature report (2008) noted that one in four of the world’s mammals are at risk of extinction from habitat loss, poaching, and climate change. Many critically important rivers—such as the Nile, the Yellow, and the Colorado—no longer empty water into the sea. Mountains of discarded cell phones and computers make their way to destitute Chinese villages, where they are picked apart for valuable metals, exposing the villagers to high concentrations of incredibly toxic materials.

To address today’s geopolitically entangled world of large, complex eco-issues, students simply have to know more than they did 40 years ago.

What’s the Problem?

Four issues have become huge obstacles to environmental literacy. First, students are extraordinarily disconnected from the environment. Richard Louv’s revelatory 2005 book Last Child in the Woods called attention to a world of children rapidly retreating from outdoor play and time spent in nature. Instead, modern kids stay indoors, “’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” as one 4th grader famously said (p. 10).

Viewing screens has become a child’s full-time job. Kids are plugged in 24/7, watching an average of 25 hours of TV a week (Gentile & Walsh, 2002) and then logging additional screen time on the Internet, browsing the Web, playing video games, and engaging in whole new verbs, like IMing and Facebooking. Louv coined the phrase nature-deficit disorder to describe the “human costs of alienation from nature” (p. 34), including diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. Just when students need contact with nature more than ever, they have abandoned it.

Second, ask any environmental educator and he or she will bemoan No Child Left Behind, whose pressures have caused many schools to trade outdoor field trips for test prep. Science teachers routinely eliminate such concepts as environmental education, which do not appear to relate directly to questions on the tests. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Web site (2009) bluntly states, “No Child Left Behind is contributing to an increasing environmental literacy gap by reducing the amount of environmental education taking place in K–12 classrooms.”

Third, students’ exposure to environmental education depends on the luck of the draw and the amalgam of the interests of whichever teachers they happen to have throughout their school career. In my daughters’ school, there were two 5th grade teachers, one contagiously obsessed with birds and birdwatching and the other in love with Broadway musicals. One class went on an all-day birding trip; the other performed a play for the entire school. Both are equally interesting and important activities, but why didn’t the two cross-pollinate and give all 5th graders equal access to both? My daughters caught the birding bug, but one-half of the 5th grade never saw a nesting piping plover.

And finally, the downside of the large nonprofit universe of environmental education facilities—zoos, museums, aquariums, nature centers, parks, arboretums, children’s gardens—is that schools approach environmental education like a Chinese menu. They pick a field trip from column A and a lesson plan from column B; toss in an occasional Earth Day assembly, litter pickup, and letter to the president; and assume that their charges are now environmentally literate. And the nonprofits, wanting students to return the following year, emphasize fun over content, immersing the students in activity-based education that is designed to serve as an appetizer for environmental literacy but ends up becoming the main course. They often retreat from tough concepts like water shortages and stay with politically lighter ones like the water cycle.

The upshot? Even though there are more centers for environmental education and more college degree programs in environment-related fields than ever, and even though building green schools has suddenly emerged as an important idea (pre-economic meltdown), we are perhaps even farther from environmental literacy than we were in 1969.

Students are graduating from our schools thinking that green is good. But we haven’t given them the tools they need to become environmentally literate citizens.

New Research May Turn the Tide

Fortunately, several important research efforts are threading their way through the education system. For example, the Children and Nature Network, a Web-based organization (www.childrenandnature.org) that reports a wide variety of data and activities related to repairing the nature deficit disorder, showcases data illuminating the educational benefits of immersing students in the outdoors and environmental education experiences. And there’s tons of data.

The American Institutes for Research (2005) studied the effects of weeklong residential outdoor education programs in which most of the participants were at-risk youth. Comparing students who experienced the outdoor education program with those in a control group who had not had the experience, the researchers found a 27 percent increase in measured mastery of science concepts, plus enhanced cooperation and conflict-resolution skills, higher self-esteem, and gains in problem solving, motivation, and classroom behavior.

A Canadian study found that children whose school grounds include diverse natural settings are more physically active, more aware of nutrition, more civil to one another, and more creative (Bell & Dyment, 2006). Another study discovered that children playing in green settings have reduced symptoms of attention deficit disorder (Taylor, Kuo, & Sullivan, 2001).

The more studies are published, the more they agree: Exposure to nature raises test scores; increases creativity, cooperation, and self-confidence; reduces stress; and enhances cognitive abilities.

Promising Models

When the next wave of environmental interest washes over our schools, as it inevitably will, this body of research will support the new ideas for truly fulfilling Stapp’s dream of environmental literacy. Here are a few intriguing efforts now underway.

No Child Left Inside

In response to Louv’s book, more than 1,000 nonprofits with almost 50 million members have launched a variety of efforts loosely organized under the title “No Child Left Inside.” For instance, the National Audubon Society has pledged to place a family-oriented nature center in every congressional district. Connecticut governor M. Jodi Rell launched a special Web site (www.nochildleftinside.org) promoting state parks, an idea copied by many other states. And the U.S. Congress has considered a No Child Left Inside act that would provide federal funding for environmental literacy plans and for state efforts to train teachers in model environmental education programming, including outdoor learning. In the last session, the act passed the House, and supporters are eager to try again in the new Congress.

Green Charter Schools

For better or worse, the charter school movement has been sweeping across the United States in the last decade. A growing number of charter schools have been designed around the simple premise that the entire science curriculum can be taught through environmental education.

The Green Woods Charter School in Philadelphia is located on the campus of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, a 340-acre living laboratory of forests and fields, streams and ponds. The center’s naturalists are integrated into the science faculty of the school, and the students spend quality time immersed in the woods.

Wisconsin’s River Crossing Environmental Charter School, located in a one-room schoolhouse, provides a hands-on curriculum with subjects integrated through environmental studies. Students in 7th and 8th grade participate weekly in field trips and real-world ecosystem restoration projects, such as restoring the prairie and building rain gardens for storm water.

Other sites include California’s Environmental Charter High School, Connecticut’s Common Ground High School, and Florida’s Academy of Environmental Sciences. A Green Charter Schools Network (www.greencharterschools.org) has formed to assist teachers and staff. Sadly, precious few students are fortunate enough to attend these schools.

Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning

Another innovation that has grown in popularity in the last decade is the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning movement, a cumbersome name for a simple concept. In place of the rigorously scheduled school day of science, English, and gym periods, these programs use the environment and the outdoors as the centerpiece of students’ curriculum. This format breaks down barriers between disciplines, stresses team building and individualized learning, and involves students in real-world community issues.

In suburban Philadelphia, for example, the pioneering Watershed program at Radnor Middle School engages students in outdoor field studies all year, including stream testing, canoeing, trout rearing and release, and more. Students in the program spend all day together, except for math and foreign language classes, in which they are integrated with the rest of the school. Students hone their communication skills at conferences and youth summits.

One analysis of 40 Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning programs (Lieberman & Hoody, 1998) discovered that students in these programs outscored their peers on standardized tests, had better grades, and acted more independently and responsibly. At one school using this approach, reports to the principal’s office declined 91 percent in the three-year study period.

Wood Kindergartens

A rather radical movement has leapt across the pond from Europe and, coupled with Richard Louv’s work, has begun making inroads in the United States. In the Wood School model, child care workers and youngsters ages 3–6 spend the entire day outdoors in nature. The program is held outdoors in all seasons, although the group moves indoors in extreme weather. Proponents of this process assert that playing outside for prolonged periods strengthens the students’ immune systems and improves development of manual dexterity, physical coordination, tactile sensitivity, and depth perception.

Here in the United States, many nature centers, such as the Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, Michigan, have begun opening variants of Wood Kindergartens, versions that might not strictly adhere to the European’s outdoor component but still allow the students full and frequent access to natural areas and nature-based play (Reynolds, 2007).

Greening of the Culture

U.S. schools teach what American culture considers important. Once society decided that computer literacy was central to a solid education, computer classes invaded schools at warp speed, and the “digital divide” became an important and contentious issue.

As environmental issues heat up (pardon the pun), the culture is coming to consensus—again—on the importance of the environment. Green cable channels, green Web sites, eco-chic clothing, green roofs on green buildings, and innumerable products made from recycled objects are beginning to infuse the culture with a newfound interest in sustainability—an interest that ideally will create a ground swell of support for environmental improvement.

But the four horsemen of the global apocalypse—warming, species loss, water scarcity, and population growth—are bearing down on us, and many environmentalists worry about a vanishing window of opportunity for addressing these issues. Science fiction writer H. G. Wells was prophetic when he wrote in 1920 that “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

Environmental literacy is one race that education must win.

What Every Student Should Know About the Environment

There are scores of possible models of environmental education programs, and most have many of the following large concepts in common. As students go from kindergarten through high school, they can work their way down the list.

1. Earth overflows with life.
One of science’s biggest mysteries is how many species share this planet— estimates range from 5 million to 100 million species. Many environmental education programs begin with the premise that life is vanishing; young learners should first know that Earth teems with a huge number of creatures.

2. Each creature is uniquely adapted to its environment.
Every species evolved to possess a unique set of adaptations that enables it to survive and thrive in its ecosystem. Students should be on a first-name basis with many local creatures.

3. The web of life is interdependent.
Organisms evolve complex relationships, each depending on numerous other species for their survival.

4. Materials flow through ecosystems in cycles.
All creatures need water, air, and nutrients to survive. These materials cycle and recycle through ecosystems. The water we drink today is the same water we’ve always had, and always will.

5. The sun is the ultimate source of energy flowing through ecosystems.
Food grows from sunlight energy; our houses are heated by fossil fuels created many millennia ago from ancient sunlight.

6. There is no waste in nature; everything is recycled.
In nature, every waste product is used by other creatures. Humans have bent those circles into straight lines, where things are used once and tossed.

7. We consume resources to live.
Every student should know where the trash truck takes the trash, where water comes from, and how the nearest power plant makes electricity.

8. Conservation is the wise use of finite resources.
We are physical creatures with real needs—to eat, drink, build houses, write on paper. But how do we use these resources sustainably?

9. Humans can have a profound effect on environmental systems.
Fossil fuels pump carbon dioxide into the sky; habitat loss is causing the extinction of large numbers of species. Our actions profoundly affect the ecological systems that sustain living things—and us. Nature can often repair these systems (forests grow back, for example); but humans are changing systems faster than nature can adapt.

10. Each of us can powerfully affect the fate of the natural world.
Because each of us is directly plugged into the planet, the actions we take—or fail to take—profoundly influence earth’s systems.

Mike Weilbacher is Director of the nonprofit Lower Merion Conservancy in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. He travels the United States as an environmental educator, performer, and workshop presenter. E-mail: mike@dragonfly.org; Web site: www.mikeweilbacher.com; Blog: www.mikeweilbacher.blogspot.com.

References

American Institutes for Research. (2005). Effects of outdoor education programs for children in California. Palo Alto, CA: Author.

Bell, A. C., & Dyment, J. E. (2006). Grounds for action: Promoting physical activity through school ground greening in Canada. Toronto: Evergreen.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation. (2009). What has NCLB done to environmental education? [Online]. Annapolis, MD: Author. Available: www.cbf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_sub_actioncenter_federal_nclb_done

Gentile, D. A., & Walsh, D. A. (2002). A normative study of family media habits. Applied Developmental Psychology, 23, 157–178.

International Union for the Conservation of Nature. (2008). IUCN Red List reveals world’s mammals in crisis [Press release]. Gland, Switzerland: Author. Available: www.iucn.org/about/work/programmes/species/red_list/?1695/IUCN-Red-List-reveals-worlds-mammals-in-crisis

Lieberman, G. A., & Hoody, L. L. (1998). Closing the achievement gap: Using the environment as an integrating context for learning. Poway, CA: State Education and Environment Roundtable.

Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Reynolds, C. (2007, January 22). Everybody in the vegetable patch! MacLeans, 42. Available: www.macleans.ca/education/universities/article.jsp?content=20070122_139722_139722

Stapp, W. B., et al. (1969). The concept of environmental education. Journal of Environmental Education, 1(1), 30–31.

Taylor, A. F., Kuo, F. E., & Sullivan, W. C. (2001). Coping with ADD: The surprising connection to green play settings. Environment and Behavior, 33(1), 54–77.

Share on Facebook

By Paul Hawken

From a commencement speech given at the University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Share on Facebook

By Kristina K. Sullivan

“Knowledge of the nearest things should be acquired first, then that of those farther and farther off.” — Comenius, 17th C. educator (Dubel and Sobel, 2008)

On the day of my twenty first birthday, I arrived in the small Appalachian town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (population 2,000) on a university field study. Though not yet a credentialed teacher, I was assigned the position of reading specialist for a small group of unmotivated yet adequately intelligent 5th-7th grade students at Cowan School, about five miles off the main highway.

It took very little time to discover that the traditional methods of schooling were not going to work, the problem exacerbated by my status as a California “outsider”.  At that idealistic age despair was not a consideration; I had no choice but to embrace our differences. Rather than following a rote lesson plan, it seemed more promising to ask them questions about themselves.

“What do you do after school?”

“Where do you fish?”

“Tell me about the deep mine that shut down and the creeks nearby and the pond.”

Asking questions turned out to be an effective approach to teaching these young students. Our conversations led to local field trips and they took me to places near by, places like Lilley Cornett Woods, now a protected old growth forest and the fishing hole where they taught me to fish.  Our outings and their understandings of their local environment were the context for a book of stories that they wrote and read aloud in class. While their reading and writing scores improved, it was the time we spent together outside that I am sure we all remember the most. Returning to my life as a student, and afterwards to a career as a classroom teacher, the experience of teaching as a responsive and contextually integrated act has affected my work in the classroom ever since.

At that time, 1979, there was no terminology to define this approach to learning. It just made sense to use the local environment as a springboard to extend the skills taught in the classroom.   It was not until the early 1990’s that David Sobel, project director at Antioch University New England and one of the leaders in the place-based movement, gave the name “place-based” to this approach to education.

In part, the place-based movement is in response to the need to reconnect students to not just the land in general but specifically, their home. According to Megan Camp, Vice-President and Program Director of Shelburne Farms, “Educational Themes and strategies come and go like fashions.  Place-based education is enduring.  It is a lens to look at an existing curriculum that brings new meaning and relevancy to the learner; it is not an add-on to an already crowded curriculum”.

Among the most convincing of the place-based endeavors that educators across the nation can look to as a model is the work of Shelburne Farms, environmental education center, national historic landmark and working farm in Shelburne, Vermont.  The folks at Shelburne provide workshops for teachers as well as field trips for students in grades K-8 throughout the year about life on a farm and the local environment.  They also have an extensive place-based curricula and the PLACE program (“PLACE” stands for Place-based landscape Analysis & Community Education).

A partner to Shelburne Farms is the Vermont Education for Sustainability Project of which is included the Sustainable Schools Project.  Among the three schools in the Burlington School District participating in this Sustainable Schools Project is Lawrence Barnes Elementary where Vietnamese, Eastern European and more recently African families have been entering the district over the past two decades.  According to Jen Cirillo, coordinator of the Sustainable Schools Project, these refugee students are proving to be among the most advantageously affected by a place-based approach to education.

Although their school experience is limited and they speak a different language, refugee students often have a vast array of experiences that get tapped in a classroom that utilizes a place-based approach to education.   For example, when first grade teachers were looking for a literacy unit that could provide connections across the curriculum, they chose the topic of animal lifecycles that included a visit from a real live chicken.  The refugee students, especially the Somali Bantu children, became “experts” on the chicken, having had previous experience with chickens.  From there sprang a literacy unit about chicken lifecycles in general.

By starting with a first-hand concrete experience students were able to build on previous knowledge that came from a variety of sources. This is a common theme among the place-based classroom; students develop meaning from more sources than the textbook or the Internet but as well, a conversation with a farmer or the experience of walking through a forest or an actual interaction with historic buildings.

Chaska Richardson, an ESL teacher in the Burlington School District, understands how place-based education helps students learn a new language. When students are learning to count, they go apple picking and bring real apples into the classroom. Richardson then takes photographs of the students counting the apples and develops a personalized book for her students based on their experience. Her students are able to develop language because they have sensory experience that builds on their phonemic and contextual skills to support new reading.   Not only do they have the sensory moments of picking and tasting an apple, but they also have a photographic book of them counting apples to use in the classroom.

Across town, fourth and fifth grade students at Lawrence Barnes School were given the assignment to write a “neighborhood report card” when they participated in a Sustainable Schools Project program called “Healthy Neighborhoods/Healthy Kids”.  Clipboards in hand, they took a walk through the neighborhood checking off the quality of life in their community.

In their subsequent evaluation and discussions, the students discovered that the town had overlooked signs in the neighborhood to caution drivers of the school crosswalk.  The kids wrote letters to city officials and presented their findings at the City Council meeting imploring them to correct the mistake.  As a result, the sign was put up a week later, despite the inevitable embarrassment of city officials. The students learned about decision-making and how to influence change, an advanced course of study for fourth and fifth graders.

“It is so much more powerful to write a persuasive letter, not about more recess time, but in order to really make a change in the neighborhood,” explains Cirillo.

No matter what the demographics of the community, rural or urban, small or large, there is an opportunity to use local resources to connect and revitalize student learning.  Neighborhood report cards, farm to school projects, local field trips and animals in the classroom, all provide a chance to bring life to abstract lessons.

Imagine the difference for a student when they are empowered to effect a change in community decision-making, as was the case for the 4/5th grade students who participated in “Healthy Neighborhoods/Healthy Kids” program, or the refugee children who became the experts when a chicken was brought into the classroom.  Place-based learning starts with small choices that the classroom teacher makes to connect learning in the classroom to life outside of the classroom.  And it often begins with a question.

Bibliography
Environment-based Education, Creating High Performance Schools and Students The National Environment Education and Training Foundation, Washington DC, September, 2000

Gruenewald, David A. and Smith, Gregory A. Place-Based Education in the Global Age Lawrence Erlbraum Associates, 2008.

PEEC- The Place-Based Education Evaluation Collaborative “concept paper”.  http://cee.SchoolGoGreen.org/PEEC

Powers, Amy L.  An Evaluation of Four Place-Based Education Programs.  The Journal of Environmental Education, summer 2004, Vol. 35, No 4 pp. 17-34

SEER Report, California Student Assessment Projects, The Effects of Environment-based education on student achievement, March, 2000

Sobel, David  Place-based Education, Connecting Classrooms and Communities.  The Orion Society, 2004

Share on Facebook

A recent post on climate change and race (http://tinyurl.com/b6fzp7) brings up an issue that really needs to be on the forefront of outdoor and environmental education moving forward. It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change will become the defining issue of our times. Just as with civil rights in the 1960’s, this will require sustained and imaginative work on the part of our education system (both formal and informal).

Recent surveys show that the percentage of citizens claiming that the “science is mixed” on human caused climate change is on the rise. Worse, even among those who believe it to be a human-caused problem, there is a high percentage who don’t feel that it is an immediate threat (http://tinyurl.com/cc6uuo). Clearly, we have not just technological and scientific work to do, we have educational work to do. I call this the importance of both “outer” work (the work of technical problem solving that comes from policy changes, technological advances, scientific research, and economic modeling for example) and “inner work” (the work of education, of faith-based institutions, community organizing, etc.).

Outdoor, environmental, and experiential education specialize, it seems to me, in this “inner work.” And yet, we continue to be a very exclusive culture group. We rely on images of humans-in-nature that typically involve the lone white male standing on the mountaintop staring into vastness (check out any current outdoor magazine for examples).

The market for outdoor lifestyles demonizes Walmart while selling clothes, equipment, cars, and other “green” commodities that are unreachable by a large percentage of the US population (not to mention the developing world). We amplify the false dichotomy between “wilderness” and civilization (see: http://tinyurl.com/ac7cav). We sell expeditions and experiences to sublime and far away places so that we can leave the city and suburbs behind to experience solitude or learn about the natural world. Does this sound like a model that invites a larger coalition to meet the present and future challenges of climate change?

People like Marjora Carter (http://www.majoracartergroup.com/) understand this. Until and unless the outdoor and environmental education fields truly examine how we might be ethically and morally bound to actively work toward limiting human suffering and not just simply promoting middle class leisure, we are complicit in the climate change problem no matter what our personal politics or lifestyles.

It is time for us to face, full on, the issues of environmental justice. The conflicts between race, class, and our common constructions of the field can no longer be ignored.  It is not a question of destroying the good work that many have done and continue to do in the name of outdoor and environmental education. De-construction is not destruction. It opens up space for an essential component of the inner work needed to address climate change: solidarity.

How can we extend our projects to link with other projects? How can we form broader coalitions– maintaining (and shifting) our identity while connecting to others? The emerging back-to-the-land movements around permaculture, community gardens, and bio-regionalism provide one such place. Place-based education offers some intriguing ways forward. There are surely others.

If we are to address the clear and pressing problems of the “inner work” of climate change we must heed Einstein’s classic maxim: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Jay is an Asst. Prof. of Education and Environmental Studies at Earlham College. His interests include: Experiential Ed, Sustainability and Schooling, and Outdoor Ed. Follow him on twitter: jaywroberts

Share on Facebook