KG+Final+Essay

Krista Glanville Final Essay Sustainability Education Spring 2014

// Imagine that you are a member of the Board of Education in a school district in which teaching climate change has become controversial. Write a letter to the community describing the district’s plan for teaching climate change that you endorse, and the rationale for this plan (anticipating the kinds of concerns some parents may have). See School Standards Wade into Climate Debate, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2012. //

Dear Community,

I am writing to you to explain plans regarding the recent controversy over teaching climate change to our students. The district will continue to teach the facts of climate change to students in our schools.

While we do not want to scare our students, it is important to introduce the facts of climate change to them throughout their education in middle and high school. It is important that we look at the facts and reflect on how our actions as humans has an affect on what happens to the environment. As the students age and their critical thinking ability strengthens, we will introduce more curriculum regarding climate change, including looking at various sources and their motivation behind the stances they take regarding the subject.

We do not want to brainwash our students. It is our obligation as teachers to educate our children so that they are prepared for life, and addressing this issue in school is a key step. This is the world they are growing up in and will continue to live in, and it is important for them to know the issues that we are creating as humans so that they can aim to rectify the situation to create a better environment for themselves and their future children. While your opinion on the overall outcome of global warming may vary, it is undeniable that human actions are altering the earth in a very dramatic way, and we have the capability to make decisions that can slow the rate at which climate change is happening. To hide this from our students would be doing a disservice to them. In high school, our students will receive a comprehensive curriculum designed to teach about climate change. While the curriculum will be guided by our teachers, students will be encouraged to do their own research and come to their own conclusion regarding the subject.

Unfortunately, researching climate change has a lot to do with politics which is why we cannot allow for this subject to be taught exclusively in the home. While we understand there are concerns regarding the teacher’s own personal opinion being pushed onto the student in the classroom, it is the educators job to teach facts and we are building a curriculum regarding the strict facts of climate change. Additional curriculum will build more on political motivators found in the public media, so that students understand no argument has one side to it. Media on both sides of climate change are guilty of exaggerating the seriousness or lack of seriousness of the topic at hand, and teaching our students how to interpret biased media is as important as anything else.

More information on the curriculum will be released at a later date, but we appreciate your efforts in helping us provide your children with a fair and fact-based education. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about what is happening, we will have a public forum next week. It is our hope that we will have your support in administrating this new curriculum to and help the students in their learning.

Sincerely,

Member, Board of Education

// What in your education has been highly influential on you, and how could you use that technique/experience to teach children about sustainability problems? //

I feel pretty lucky in that I believe I had an education that supported the teaching of climate change and sustainability problems from early on. I don’t remember ever being told that climate change was not real, or that we did not have to think about how our actions affect the earth.

The last five years at RPI has been a more significant education than what I received in the past. While I did not take many sustainability or science courses, my education in architecture has always supported a conversation regarding sustainability. We are introduced to courses designed to teach of ways that our architecture can be more environmentally friendly, through both passive design (which typically references older styles of buildings) and innovative active technology.

At the middle of my college career, I spent a semester in New York City working with the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE). This is the part that I will be talking about.

CASE is a program that represents a partnership between RPI and the architecture firm SOM, which is one of the largest firms in the world and specializes in a lot of high-rise buildings. At CASE, we worked with both PhD and Master students who were studying architectural sciences. All of the courses we took at CASE involved research on technology that would make skyscrapers (or buildings in general) more “green”. The studio project I worked on paired me with a fellow bachelor student and two master students, and we had to redesign an existing tower to make it more environmentally friendly ([]).

I think that this was a challenging activity that required critical thinking; it’s not just about how to make the building sustainable, but also requires thought in how the people use the building and how can the building influence the people to make them more conscientious about the environment. Once you get past the fourth floor of a building, you lose the connection with the street and the existing environment that continues to move on below you. When you are lost in a sea of grey buildings and skyscrapers, it is easy to forget that you are living on a planet that is naturally blue and green.

Our project involved continuing Frankfurt’s “green belt” into the skyscraper, dedicating a giant portion of the building to a vertical garden. This way, even at floor fifty, the connection to the natural world still exists. It is better for the environment on a personal level as well as statistically speaking.

Depending on the age of the child, asking them to redesign a skyscraper may not be an appropriate task, but I do think it would be fun to ask them to redesign their house to make it more eco-friendly, or build their dream house, making it as green as possible. This could be done easily through materials they already know and love, like Legos or programs like the Sims.

In the process of designing the house, it would be easy to start a conversation regarding the different ways their product can be beneficial for the environment. You could talk about which materials are better to use because of their renewable properties, or how well-placed windows means you can use natural sunlight instead of artificial light, but too many windows means the house may not be properly insulated in cooler months. You could also talk about what they want to put in their gardens, or how recycling works, what each tree on the property means for the air quality, how they can have a shed for their bike instead of an extra spot in the driveway for another car.

Designing a house really gets down to the roots of how people live, and if we expect people to alter their habits to become more environmentally-friendly, this is a great place to start.

// Describe and critically evaluate the arguments made in “The Heart of Sustainability: Big Ideas from the field of Environmental Education and their Relationship to Sustainability Education. Or ‘What’s love got to do with it?’” //

I appreciate the way Burgess and Johannessen start off the article with an anecdote about how crows defend their neighborhood from a threat—with an outcry—but when humans do it, nothing seems to happen. “What roles do love and caring play?” they ask.

They address a key fear that humans are facing (and creating) a “deepening ecological crisis that has never been faced before”, that that in order to create a culture, environment and economy that are viable long-term things must change. Educators play a key roll in this because they have the ability to shape the generations of the future: our students must consider how our current lifestyle is supporting the degradation of the earth’s ecosystems. What is required is a deeper love for humanity; it is love for humanity that will be able to change the way we think and shape our actions. Facts and policy is not enough. Educators need to focus on teaching and cultivating this capacity for love.

The authors then focus on the issue with the topic of sustainability—that it is a loosely defined term that on its own does not mean very much. The definition and goal of the word changes depending on the expert you are talking to. It is also easy to manipulate in that it can be altered to support the argument you are trying to make—no matter what that argument may be. Human well-being may depend on vibrant economy, healthy environment and equitable society, but is sustaining an industrialized society the sustainability we are looking for? Thinking globally on topics of what true sustainability is does not seem very sustainable at all—the industries and habits that sustain our country and culture in this country are not sustainable in the environmental sense. Through resource exploitation, pollution and poor land and water stewardship, there will not be much left to sustain.

The authors argue that “to inspire people enough to make changes in their perceptions and behaviors, sustainability education must embrace the central role of acquiring ecological knowledge through direct and shared experiences in the natural world”. I believe this relates back to what I wrote about in the previous question, regarding my eco-friendly redesign of a tower in Frankfurt. Creating an environmentally-friendly tower is not just about technology, but about inspiring a love for the environment in its users.

The relationship between human and environment extends beyond just love and compassion but also into the realms of economic and social relationships as well. The authors argue that as naturalists and educators, their concern is with cultivating love for nature and humanity. They feel that this is diminished by sustainability education which forces the introduction of multiple disciplines including science, literature, history, civics and arts. I think that this is interesting; while the authors feel that all that is needed to shape society is to cultivate a strong love for environment, they think that education through the multiple disciplines takes away from that. However I feel that the additional disciplines might add to the growth of compassion for the environment, as well as provide a more concrete approach to the problems. I think that both are necessary but I do believe that just love and compassion on its own is more powerful because it truly appeals to the emotions of the human. All of the players have the shared interest of effectively educating for change and sustainability, they just have different approaches to doing it.

In the first of the authors’ list of “big ideas” they bring up the troubling issue that younger generations are growing up in a world where nature is more and more inaccessible, making it harder to foster this intimate relationship that is so important to the cause. Sustainability education becomes another boring subject taught in the classroom that the students can’t relate to and therefore have a hard time caring about it. How can we create a curriculum that will provide children with the experiences that awaken care, concern and love for the environment? They go on to explain that interdisciplinary nature will add to the students’ enthusiasm for learning and critical thinking skills, and that recognizing the relationship between ecosystems, economies, people and place results in an increase in thinking skills and the development of personal ethics.

The authors argue that they will continue to support an education that embraces the qualities of both sides of environmental education, including experiential, place-based, interdisciplinary and nature-centered curriculum. However, they fear that children’s diminishing affiliation with nature might become more predominant in education and the curriculum will reflect this by “excluding the importance of connecting students to nature in deep and meaningful ways”, and that this will actually do a disservice to environmental education. It is a concern that a curriculum that is based solely on the study of the definition and principals of sustainability will not engender the love for nature that personal experiences do, and this is something that is visible in students today. It is important to foster this love for nature while they are young and developing so that they may continue this personal affiliation with the natural world into their adult lives.

// Consider what Jane Elliot’s pedagogical intervention into racial bias suggests for environmental education (which also calls for cultural transformation in students). And consider how education that aims to transform students relates to but differs from education that aims to empower students. //

Jane Elliot’s blue-eyed, brown-eyed experience aimed to teach children about racial bias by grouping the students into two sectors dependent on the color of their eyes. The transformation in the students as they are told they are either the superior or inferior group is frightening and profound.

I think this has a few implications that can be carried into environmental education. I think that the racial bias exercise can also teach students a great deal about media bias. When examining the media’s role in environmental issues, it is clear that there are two or more sides to each topic. It may seem unlikely that each side truly believes their stance is the correct one but this exercise teaches that it is easy to pick a side and truly believe in it, no matter how outrageous the details may be.

This exercise could be manipulated to represent two groups in the class as two sides of the media (like an exercise that has been tried and discussed in our class). The aim of Elliot’s exercise is to demonstrate to the children that bias is not right, and that it can grossly manipulate and alter an environment or situation. I think that the experiment would have to be changed to work successfully with media bias in the role of environmental education, but it would be a good opportunity to show students that they cannot believe everything (or anything) they hear in the media, which is a key factor that students need to understand if they are going to have a truly effective and accurate education in sustainability.

I feel like a second factor of Jane Elliot’s experiment that can be introduced into environmental education is how she is able to seriously affect the student’s emotional side. The reason her lesson is so effective is because she is able to awaken something in every student that they may not normally get in a typical classroom lesson. Even as she redoes the exercise with adult workers in the prison, she is able to effectively teach her lesson through provoking deep emotional reactions in the students.

This emotional reaction is something that needs to be introduced into environmental education if it expects to be effective. There is a cultural transformation that is required if we expect students (and humanity in general) to start caring and continue to care about the environment.

Like Burgess and Johanessen argue in a separate article, teaching a love for the natural world is as important (if not more important) than teaching through multidisciplinary methods that require our students to read, research, and do much more to get at the center of environmental issues. While multidisciplinary studies are important, it is easy for students to get lost in the monotonous thoughts and find themselves unable to think critically about the subject or relate it to something they actually care about. The growing trend of a media-based generation, where students will play video games instead of sports, or explore the larger world through a big-screen television instead of actually going out and exploring the wilderness on their own, is largely responsible for the death of the intimate relationship between people and nature. If we expect environmental education to alter the mindset of students, so that they not only learn about the subjects but they actually care about the issues and take personal interest in rectifying what humanity has done to destroy the earth.

The reason Jane Elliot’s experiment is so interesting is because it forgoes the interdisciplinary lessons that could be brought in to teach students about racial bias, and strictly adheres to an exercise that does nothing but change the way students //feel//. Her dedication to a lesson that deals only with feeling, and not with reading articles or looking at studies or explore other mediums, is bold but highly effective. I would argue that the lesson may not have been as effective if multidisciplinary studies were introduced.

This is where the topic of transformative education versus empowering education is introduced; while we can provide students with all the materials they need to //transform,// it will not have an effect if the student is not //empowered//. If we focus on how to empower our students, and do it successfully, the transformation will follow naturally.

// Describe the controversy that has erupted around leaked documents showing The Heartland Institute’s plans to develop k-12 curriculum. See Leaked Docs Reveal How Top Think Tank Turns Oil Money Into Climate Denial. //

The Heartland Institute is an organization that supports the denial of climate change and exploits documents and comments taken out of context that aim to prove that the scientists who identify climate change as a serious problem understand it as a “great big hoax”. Two years ago, confidential documents belonging to the Heartland Institute were leaked, proving that their support for climate change denial may not have had honest motives.

The organization collects money from donors—millions of dollars—to be invested in the efforts to advertise climate change as false. They fund professionals that discredit climate change and cultivate sympathy for anti-climate ideas.

The documents suggest that oil companies may be their largest sponsor. It is hard to construct a scenario where oil companies donate large sums of money to anti-climate organizations for any reason other than personal profit—could it be that the oil companies truly believe that climate change is false? Or is it more likely that they know they have a key role in the disasters that increase the speed that climate change is happening, and wish to convince the world that climate change is false to avoid responsibility.

Policies that would reduce global warming pollution would have profound effects on oil companies, so however dishonest, the coordinated effort to deny climate change is beneficial to the companies.

What was interesting about the leaked documents was the details for funding K-12 curriculums to illustrate climate science as controversial and false. The curriculum is designed by a coal-industry consultant (who is not a climate scientist) at the price of $100,000 a year. The curriculum covers topics that suggests that all of the ideas of climate change are highly controversial—humans playing a role, CO2 as a pollutant, and that even the methods used to understanding the weather is controversial.

The curriculum paints the picture that climate change issues are not consistent with sound science and that we are misleading students to the belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. They paint themselves as altruistic, returning “sound science” to climate change education, and “discouraging the political propaganda that too often passes as education,”—so long as that political propaganda isn’t in support of oil company giants.

The same institution that once fought for evolution education, the National Center for Science Education, has begun a new program to support climate change education and fight global warming denial in textbooks and classrooms. With the financial support backing the Heartland Institute, it will take more than a couple of leaked documents to eradicate their work, but by supporting the proper education of our students regarding climate change subjects, we can construct a generation of people who are aware of climate change problems and what causes them.

This is why the K-12 curriculum supported by the Heartland Institute is so significant—they are aware that by tapping into the education system of children and young adults, they can create a generation of people who will not question or doubt the work they are doing in the public media once they grow into adulthood. Essentially, the Heartland Institute is designing a generation of supporters, a mass population that will not fight their efforts as adults. This is possibly the most dangerous and frightening thing about the leaked documents.