Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
these issues by creating a climate for environment-based education as a basis for edu-
cational reform. Addressing the following key needs gleaned from our experience dur-
ing the last twenty years could result in more widespread adoption of restoration-based
education strategies in both formal and informal contexts:
• Enhancing STEM content connections
• Including multicultural perspectives and ways of knowing
• Building the capacity of informal and formal K-16 educators, including natural
resource and conservation practitioners, volunteers and citizen scientists, to
boost experiential, place-based, learner-centered, restoration-based education
• Assessing learning outcomes and effects for students, teachers, informal science
educators, and community partners
Conclusion
The potential for restoration-based education is unlimited and so are the motivations
to enact it on a broader scale. Oil spills, melting glaciers, altered bird migrations, loss
of crucial habitat, species loss, and geophysical events underscore the need for eco-
literate responses for prevention, mitigation, and restoration.
At the very time we most need a generation with an acute awareness and practical
knowledge of the natural world, we face losing young people to a mostly virtual expe-
rience of that world. In fact, a recent study by the Kaiser Foundation found that young
people are spending almost all of their waking hours (seven and a half hours daily,
seven days a week) consuming electronic entertainment media—television, comput-
ers, print, and other media for viewing, reading, listening to music, or gaming—and
another two hours talking or texting on cell phones. If you count media multitasking,
using more than one medium at a time, the average jumps to ten and a half hours a
day. This does not count time using devices for schoolwork (Rideout, Foehr, and
Roberts 2010).
Earth Partnership for Schools offers an alternative to enhance ecological and
STEM literacy, efficacy, and civic engagement. We can hope that as children and
their adult learning partners become more intimately reengaged with nature, their
natural tendency toward affiliation with other living things (or biophilia as described
by Kellert and Wilson 1995) will be strengthened, and their sense of obligation to pro-
tect and restore living systems engaged. EPS teacher Peter Senti put it this way:
The natural world is as exciting and as interesting as any video game. The prob-
lem is that it takes patience, hard work, and creativity to foster this excitement.
We have such amazing natural resources within a five-minute walk from our
school doors, and yet our school has only scratched the surface of taking edu-
cational advantage of them. Research has strongly indicated that positive child-
hood experiences in the natural environment are the single most influential in-
dicator of environmental sensitivity (Sivek 2002; Chawla and Cushing 2007).
Higher levels of environmental sensitivity correlate with responsible envi-
ronmental behaviors (Sivek and Hungerford 1989-1990). If we as parents,
