Education in Times of Environmental Crises

Teaching Children to Be Agents of Change

Ken Winograd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317371762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The core assumption of this book is the interconnectedness of humans and nature, and that the future of the planet depends on humans' recognition and care for this interconnectedness. This comprehensive resource supports the work of pre-service and practicing elementary teachers as they teach their students to be part of the world as engaged citizens, advocates for social and ecological justice.

Challenging readers to more explicitly address current environmental issues with students in their classrooms, the book presents a diverse set of topics from a variety of perspectives. Its broad social/cultural perspective emphasizes that social and ecological justice are interrelated. Coverage includes descriptions of environmental education pedagogies such as nature-based experiences and place-based studies; peace-education practices; children doing environmental activism; and teachers supporting children emotionally in times of climate disruption and tumult. The pedagogies described invite student engagement and action in the public sphere. Children are represented as 'agents of change' engaged in social and environmental issues and problems through their actions both local and global.

II Place-Based Education

From Appreciation of Nature to Community Action

Place-based education (PBE) is a broad curricular field. It encompasses both social and ecological units of study. Sometimes, place-based work simply (and not so simply) consists of children's experience of and reconnection with local places, like experiences in nature. PBE can also entail more explicit study of local issues and problems, including children planning and implementing actions in response to these issues and problems. The focus of Chapters 4 through 7 in Section II emphasizes students’ reconnection with nature as place, a type of place-based education with a focus on the ecological. In Chapter 4, Simon Boxley, Gopal Krishnamurthy, and Mary-Ann Ridgway describe schools that are based on the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti of India. Krishnamurti schools promote a vision of the ‘integrated’ person by allowing opportunities for solitude, quietness, and reflectiveness in nature. From this perspective, the role of the educator is that of embodied questioner, moving the learner to greater self-knowledge without ever exercising ‘authority over.’

Jolie Mayer-Smith and Linda Peterat in Chapter 5 describe a multi-year project in British Columbia, Canada, in which elementary school children have year-long experiences working on a local farm, learning agriculture from (retired) mentor farmers, thus helping these young learners sow ‘seeds of stewardship.’ In Chapter 6, environmental educator Ted Watt, who has for many years partnered with elementary schools as a ‘naturalist in residence,’ describes the excitement of students who are engaged in outdoor education. Watt suggests that schools ought to consider employing environmental educators, just as they do physical education and music teachers. Still, Watt recognizes the potential of teachers to develop the interest and capacity to themselves lead the kinds of teaching he illustrates in the chapter.

Art educator Geraldine Burke's work (Chapter 7) reflects PBE that focuses on nature appreciation and how art can help learners develop their aesthetic relationship with the natural world. Burke describes her work with pre-service elementary teachers and, then, the work of these young teachers with their elementary students, doing art as a means of learning about local school habitats, thus becoming more aware of local wildlife needs. She also shows how students can learn the ways that Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities connect to animals and land through their art. Linda Wason-Ellam (Chapter 8) shares Burke's respect for Indigenous cultures but, now, in the teaching of a unit on water to a fourth grade class in Saskatchewan. Students learned about water from both Indigenous and traditional Western scientific perspectives. There is much that non-Indigenous peoples can learn from Indigenous peoples and philosophies, especially their reverential relationship with the land, and Wason-Ellam's work reminds us of these important land-centered worldviews.

In Chapter 9, Candice Satchwell examines the relative merits of three approaches to climate change education: broad school-wide programs that aim to forge an ethos of sustainability; one-off activities or visits from local activist groups; and engaging children as ‘researchers’ on more long-term projects. Not discounting any of these approaches, Satchwell argues that they all have a place in the larger agenda of climate change education. Satchwell's work is both straightforward and potentially powerful, by providing children with opportunities and spaces to simply notice and reflect on the environment around them. The chapter also examines the quintessential challenge of school learning and ‘transfer’: to what extent do students transfer school experience and learning to their subsequent behavior at home with their families.

Christy Radbourne (Chapter 10) and Karen Malone's (Chapter 11) chapters are explicitly grounded in the language of PBE and, importantly, in its child-as-activist orientation. Radbourne, an elementary school principal in Thunder Bay, Ontario (Canada), examines a series of place-based activities done by her students, teachers, and community. In one project, students collaborated with a local pizzeria in a buy-local campaign. Karen Malone describes the participation of kindergarten and fifth grade students in the planning of a new residential development. The aim of the project was to provide an opportunity for children to have authentic input into the design of the new development so that it will incorporate the visions and dreams of children growing up in the area. The project was implemented through a series of research workshops with residents and children from the local community.

The power of PBE, as described by the chapters in this section, comes in the collaboration among students, teachers, and community participants, involving intergenerational mentoring relationships and explicitly aimed at teaching young children how to do civic engagement…as ‘agents of change.’

4 LEARNING CARE FOR THE EARTH WITH KRISHNAMURTI

Simon Boxley, Gopal Krishnamurthy, and Mary-Ann Ridgway

DOI: 10.4324/9781315671970-4

Almost all of us feel responsible for our family, children and so on, but do not have the feeling of being wholly concerned and committed to the environment around us, to nature, or totally responsible for our actions. This absolute care is love. Without this love there can be no change in society.

(Krishnamurti, 1981, p. 33)

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say: “This is an oak tree,” or “that is a banyan tree,” the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come to contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.

(Krishnamurti, 2010, p. 20)

Seventy teenagers and 18 adults from over 20 different countries pour out of a rambling old Georgian manor house at Brockwood Park School. A seven-minute walk leads to Inwoods Small School with four adults and 30 primary-age children from the local neighborhood. Both of these sister schools sit in the countryside of Hampshire, England, and are two of the handful of schools worldwide founded on the principles of the Indian-born educator, philosopher, and iconoclast Jiddu Krishnamurti. Half of this motley group of young people and adults adorn blindfolds and the other half guide them by touch as they begin their exploratory walk around the school campus.

It is indeed the autumnal season of mists and mellow fruitfulness; the earth is wet with the morning dew and yet many of the walkers are barefoot. The more they walk, the less the guidance and greater the independence. Soon the guides allow the walkers to explore pace and direction and to navigate by themselves, merely looking out for their safety. Halfway through the walk, after about 30 minutes, they switch roles. The blindfolded walkers are guided to touch, smell, hear, and occasionally even taste different life and organic forms from their natural environment. The touch of branches and bark, the smell of compost and wet grass, the sound of birdcalls and twigs crackling underfoot, the taste of crushed pine needles and even untrodden soil, are invitations for a heightened sensory and sensuous engagement with the world around (while temporarily keeping the sense of sight in abeyance).

Next, activities that engage the sight are included. This is another opportunity for learning firsthand from the world context rather than secondhand from textbook and text. There is now occasion to navigate our inner and outer landscapes as one whole movement, with questions to be asked together by teacher and student, such as, “Is there an observation, not partial, but with all the senses? Is there an observation without the past [memory, experience and knowledge]?” (Krishnamurti, 1979); “Let us find out if it is possible to look at that flower without naming it” (Krishnamurti, 1961, p. 5). Sense-based maps can be drawn, studied, redrawn, and navigated, indicating the play of our senses, feelings, and thoughts in exploring the worlds within and without, and in understanding the place of our senses in learning a sense of place.

This chapter offers a glimpse of the learning experienced by children whose schooling has been more or less shaped by the educational vision of Krishnamurti. However, the authors—two of whom work in such schools and one of whom has worked only in UK state schools—believe that features of this pedagogy might be employed in many types of educational settings to support children in developing a love and respect for their world and community.

What Makes Krishnamurti's Pedagogy Distinctive?

The approaches to learning in and about nature associated with Krishnamurti emphasize awareness, presence, and being with nature. The responses they illicit from children to environmental degradation, both global and local, are not predetermined or expected. In a sense, it would be fair to say that the relationships that children may go on to build with nature are symptoms of the wider processes of self-awareness, self-learning, and self-knowledge that are so central to Krishnamurti's teaching.

In what follows, you will find a challenge to the idea that simply acquiring or ‘owning’ knowledge of global environmental issues will assist in advancing ecological health and well-being. We will enquire into whether particular types of experience of nature—those which are open and undirected, and draw attention to one's awareness and presence—might yield a consciousness of one's environment which is characterized by love, and which may lead to a sustained effort on all our parts to care for the Earth. We believe that it is unlikely that we will care for that which we do not love. So, should elementary teachers give up on teaching about the big environmental issues altogether in favour of learning about oneself? Individual teachers will make their own judgements about that, but counter-intuitively the pedagogical experiments conducted in Krishnamurti schools suggest that such an approach might nurture and sustain an integrated attitude towards environments!

We all arrive in this world eager to learn and to understand with significant capacities to observe, to listen, to be alert with all our senses. In the formative years, there is very little judgment in our endeavors to understand our surroundings, and our interests are hardly selective; we are curious and open to whatever is in our pathway. We start out in life awake, aware, and alert to our full potential. In the highly intellectually stimulating environment of schools, where rational thought is considered a powerful tool, there is a shift from this (natural) sensorial, unambitious approach to learning, to something that demands great verbal capacity, quick thinking, and the ability to measure one's ‘progress’ so that we can join the competitive paths to ‘success.’ Can schools that serve young children make a conscious shift away from the metrics and fast pace of this type of education, to a learning environment that allows children's immersion in unmeasured and uninstructed periods in nature? To allow periods when the child can marvel at the jewels of dewdrops under their feet, touch the fresh sticky buds of a blossoming tree, feel the earth on their hands, or watch the intricate movements of a caterpillar, not just once and consider it ‘done,’ but with a never-ending sense of wonder and discovery for the living world, and a growing and strengthening communion with it?

There is an emerging awareness in education that schools need to be more than just institutions that impart knowledge and skills to young people—even, perhaps especially, knowledge about the environment and its destruction—that learning how to learn and how to relate with one another is also significant to our future planetary well-being, job satisfaction, and sustained family interactions. Greater emphasis is being ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION I Setting the Stage for Elementary Teachers, with Eyes Wide Open
• SECTION II Place-Based Education: From Appreciation of Nature to Community Action
• SECTION III Teaching Peace
• SECTION IV Children’s Activism: From the Local to the Global
• SECTION V Explicit Teaching to Support Children’s Emotions and Resilience
• SECTION VI Opportunities for Professional Development: Teachers Moving Ahead, with Urgency
• Supplemental Texts and Resources
• About the Authors
• Index