Teachers and Environmental Education

I've written about sense of place and advocating for teachers to connect kids more to the outdoors. See my post called Sense of Place. Kids should be outside, they should be learning and connecting to their environment. Start with the backyard, slowly move up to the world. As an adult I feel that I have problems connecting to places that I don't know, empathizing with their problems and feeling like I can talk intelligently about a problem half a world away. I would consider myself an informed environmentalist and if I have problems making these connections than I can only imagine how children feel. 

Who teaches kids about the woods then, who connects kids to nature on their level? Lots of people can! Parents, Boy/ Girl Scout leaders, Youth Group leaders, non formal educators, camp counselors, volunteers, friends, family, and of course, classroom teachers. Classroom teachers have an amazing opportunity for connection. Why? Because our government, and many around the world, has deemed the subjects of math, literature, social science, history, art, music and physical education so important that they will pay for it's citizens to have at least a base line knowledge of these subjects, not only for just one year, but for 13 years if you include kindergarten. Putting environmental education and building environmental connection in a school curriculum only adds weight to the subject matter. Because environmental education is so broad it can be combined with any preexisting course. For example, learning about math by analyzing data collected from trees, learning about the water cycle by collecting rainwater and kayaking down a river, reading about the history of your town and looking at ways the land was used (maybe map some old stone walls!). The opportunities are there. 

Now here comes the hard part. It's a great idea. I can get many people excited and interested in implementing this type of curriculum. They agree that yes this should be done! By someone. Usually when people say 'someone' they could mean one of two things 'someone' meaning YOU or 'someone' meaning NOT ME. There is a disconnect between teachers and environmental education. Keep in mind, I do not mean all teachers, some are great and excited to bring backyards into their classroom. Disconnect number 1) teachers work extremely hard. They are paid very little. They have terrible budgets to work with. 

Let me step on a soap box for a hot minute here: If our military can buy pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want, and millions of dollars can be put into presidential campaigns... Tell me why teachers have to fund-raise for field trips? Tell me why we can feed every prisoner 3 square meals a day but our kids who are in public school have to pay for lunch? Tell me why supplies like new books (I remember only using ONE book in my high school that was less than 5 years old, our history books still had the USSR in the map) graphing calculators and computers are often times deemed 'too expensive'? Ok I'm stepping off the soap box now. 

Going back. The teacher is worked very hard, many days bringing home quizzes to grade, papers to read, progress reports to fill out. They should have enough time to have a life too. Adding something else onto the job of a teacher is not only short sighted but also disrespectful of their time. Disconnect number 2) Some teachers just plain don't like going outside. So because they aren't interested in it, the don't do it. And so instead of a teacher creating a unique lesson plan which was about going outside to learn about chipmunks foraging or migratory Canadian Geese, the students sit inside and learn about penguins. This was my 4th grade class. We learned about penguins. I am from Vermont. I am 10. I have never seen a penguin in my life. I have no idea what South America or Antarctica look like. I only know that penguins are flightless birds that look cute and waddle. We learned about penguins for what seemed like weeks. It was fall and often times at recess we would point out migrating geese and the V shape they make as they were flying south. Curiosity and wonder were running wild. Where did they go? What did they do there? Why didn't they stay in Canada? Why learned about penguins and not geese I still have no idea. I remember clearly our teacher standing at the front of the class after the test and saying how disappointed she was that we all had done poorly on our exam. If I could see her now I would remind her. I was 10. I didn't give two shits about penguins. Our grades reflect your teaching. You failed to inspire excitement and curiosity and you also used an abstract animal. Our development wasn't ready for abstract thought. Good job, you set us up for failure, and then you told us it our fault. 

Another high school science teacher of mine in AP Biology talked about pea plants and genetics. This was a perfect opportunity. Why didn't we have pea plants?! We could have grown and cross pollinated pea plants! But now we learned about it through a book. Thanks. Way to remove real life experiences from your classroom. Some people, just like some teachers, don't like going outside. And so they have the flexibility to choose to learn from a book instead. This is robbing a classroom of direct experience. Even if an activity was there, if it was all set up, easy for the teacher, not any more work perhaps less, that teacher could look outside and say 'well, it's raining, I don't want to do that' and just not. This makes me so mad. I can't choose whether or not I want to learn math in public schools, so teachers shouldn't be able to choose to do an entire course on environmental issues inside. 

Moral of the story: working with teachers and finding solutions to these barriers is going to be the next step in a more integrated approach to bringing kids closer to their place and connecting them in many ways to the environment.