Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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With education and knowledge comes the duty to see that the planet is well
used.
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Knowledge can only truly be said to exist when we can understand the effects
of knowledge on people and their communities.
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Educational institutions together with their staff should be models of care,
mindfulness, integrity and responsibility.
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Learning should be active, enquiring, sensitive and sensual, formal and informal.
Without this, learning, and certainly formal education, can be a dangerously abstract,
instrumental and amoral thing. Education needs to reconnect people with their
environments, with their experiences and with themselves. It needs to recover the
importance and value of the senses and their inter-relationships, of their feelings and
intuitions, seeking to embody an engagement with the world of which we are all a
part (Abram, 1996).
Curriculum change is just one necessary part of this paradigm shift, for it also
requires a major shift in the wider cultural values, dispositions and proclivities
informing modernization and (post-)industrial development that currently define the
purpose of 'education'. In many countries, not just the UK or US, primary/elementary
education has driven ESD, inspired in large part by the belief that adults are 'saving'
the world for their children. This is a notion often referencing Native Americans,
such as Chief Seattle's 1855 'Manifesto for the Earth' (the authenticity of which is
disputed by some), in which he asserts that the Great Chief in Washington who
wants to buy 'Indian' territory cares nothing for the land and once, having conquered
it, will surely move on, forgetting 'his father's grave and his children's heritage'
(Chief Seattle (2000), quoted in Benton and Short, 2000: 12). The idea that we
should teach children to care for the natural world and non-human inhabitants has
long been popular, reasonably funded from public and private sources, and politically
quite acceptable (Palmer, 1998). Over the years there have been innumerable pedagogic
approaches, educational theories, toolkits, curriculum packs, teaching aids, lesson
plans and so on, produced by the likes of the IUCN, the WWF, UNESCO, and even
some of the major oil and chemical companies like Shell. There have also been
numerous conservation, wildlife and outdoors environmental education programmes,
such as Project Wild, which have aimed to nurture awareness, action and responsible
citizenship among young children. Steve van Matre's
Earth Education
(1990) and
Joseph Bharat Connell's
Sharing Nature with Children
(1998) have been particularly
influential, although it should be remembered that environmental education is only
one aspect of ESD.
Scott and Gough (2003) have identified three approaches to thinking about
sustainable development, learning and change. The first approach sees the problems
we face as being primarily environmental, to be understood and solved through
science and the application of appropriate technologies. The second approach sees
our current problems as primarily social and political, in which the environmental
issues are relegated to the status of symptoms rather than causes. Solutions can be
found through the application of social scientific, local and indigenous knowledge,
where learning facilitates choice between perceived alternatives and futures. The
third approach sees our knowledge and tools as essentially inadequate, requiring
learning to be inevitably open-ended and lifelong. Uncertainty and complexity
characterize our life-worlds, necessitating reflective social and co-operative learning.
