The theme of the AEOE 2001 Spring Conference at Westminster Woods is “Bringing It All Back Home: Lifelong Environmental and Place-based Education.” Lifelong environmental education means a well designed program that would:
- provide students an opportunity for ecological learning at every grade level, so that students gain the comfort and skills necessary to become independent learners into their adult life
- utilize curriculum aligned with the state frameworks and national level standards in environmental education, including ecological literacy concepts such as networks, nested systems, cycles, flows, development and dynamic balance (Center for Ecoliteracy), or the more traditional ECDCICA (Institute for Earth Education-IEE)
- create a community of learners and encourage every student to become a skilled and responsible participant in their home, school and larger community
- offer hands-on activities through on-school-site, field trip, and residential experiences that allow students to develop a personal connection with nature and construct meaning for their own lives
- recognize age-appropriate cognitive levels and multiple intelligences to build on previous understandings and experiences
- articulate with the residential outdoor school experience that every student receives
- allow students to apply and deepen their learning by working on personal change and environmental issues in their human and natural communities
The state of environmental education in California is a long way from this ideal, but there are bright spots throughout the state in classrooms, communities, and out in nature.
Many resident outdoor schools offer their attending schools a pre-trip and post-trip curriculum. However, informal talks with school teachers indicate to me that less than half use the pre-trip curriculum and very few use the post-trip curriculum. This curriculum itself is not the best of what we offer, often being a collection of poorly integrated, independent activities gathered from other environmental education collections. The Institute for Earth Education has a useful definition for judging the value and depth of any program: A carefully crafted, fully integrated series of learning experiences that are focused, sequential and cumulative. Many times teachers are offered training and activities from the “projects:” Project WILD, Project Learning Tree and Project WET. While many of these activities are creative and useful, over-reliance on the projects encourages the idea that a bunch of activities make a curriculum or program – they do not.
There are, however, well planned and integrated curriculums available that could be shared with our visiting schools. I’ll offer four examples that I’ve used or recently become familiar with:
- A Child’s Place in the Environment (ACPE): Developed in California to meet Science Framework and other subject area concepts and content, this K-6 curriculum is easy to use yet contains real learning and high level thinking. It is unfortunately not articulated with the ROSS experience. <http://www.acpe.lake.k12.ca.us/>.
- Using Environment as a Integrating Context for learning (EIC) is not a curriculum but an approach to school reform which uses the human and natural environment as the central subject in all curricular areas. <http://www.seer.org/pages/GAP.html>
- The Center for Ecoliteracy has established and funded a number of school-based programs which use school gardens and watersheds as paths into a connection for every student with the natural world and the communities which it supports. <http://www.ecoliteracy.org/>
- Earthkeepers and Sunship III, programs from the Institute for Earth Education, have lead-in and follow-up curriculum designed into the programs, and sites offering these programs maintain contact with each visiting school. <http://www.eartheducation.org/>
I hope that AEOE will play a central role in bringing together classroom teachers, residential outdoor school staff, and people working in other settings such as nature centers so that we may together create and implement high quality, lifelong environmental education for all of our students.
