So everybody is always asking me… “Are you doing any work?” So now you get your just desserts… having to read a blog about work… It is just that it seems more fun and interesting to write about the latest wilderness tramp or eco marvel than the latest section of a food policy paper. But… I did get to go to the New Zealand Environmental Education Conference two weeks ago, which was excellent, and since a number of the folks reading this blog are generally interested in sustainability, community and/or education… here are some of the best things I harvested at the conference for your learning pleasure. Sorry, no pictures.
P.S. I tried to google the NS one to compare and could not easily find anything, just documents for each course or topic. Hmmm?
Enviroschools (www.enviroschools.org.nz)
Enviroschools is a pretty amazing NGO that is taking a whole school approach to education for sustainability. It pretty well dominates sustainability approaches in schools in NZ. More than 25% of the schools in New Zealand are enviroschools and working toward bronze, silver or green gold status. What is so neat is that this is a very reflective, philosophy based and student centred process of working for sustainability. Everything done in an Enviroschool is to be anchored in 5 principles:
- Empowered Students: Enable the development of skills, knowledge, confidence and experience to contribute to their communities.
- Integrate Māori perspectives.
- Learning for Sustainability:
- Sustainable Communities: Connect children and young people/tamariki and rangatahi to contribute to their communities.
- Respect for the diversity of people and cultures in our communities and world.
These principles must be enacted in four areas… involving everyone (kids, teachers, janitors, parents, community, etc.), greening of the place, greening of the curriculum experiences, and the lifestyle practices (composting, water use). How exactly the school takes the principles and applies them in the areas is up to them, but there is a rigourous self-assessment process involving interacting with an external facilitator. Ultimately the kids decide after working through an evidence based process on what they have done. Each school has to have a lead student group. Anyway, it is pretty neat and very different to the activity package, tick the box approaches in Canada. I am going to spend some time with the staff in the next few weeks, visit some schools and bring home some of the resources. I am going to buy the toolkit which is amazing in that the activities and concepts apply all the way from preschool to university (and it is a beautiful artistic presentation). Lots of great community development, empowerment, facilitation activity ideas. They also have the script we can use for next year’s solstice play (with a few adaptations)!
Steady State Economy (steadystate.org)
The concept that at the core of all our sustainability problems is that we have a world economy based on growth in a limited biosphere, which cannot support it. These are economists defining and developing ways to change the fundamental assumptions to bring about a steady state economy. There’s lots here but the briefing papers are most accessible under “Explore.”
Education for Sustainability and Environmental Education in Schools
http://seniorsecondary.tki.org.nz/Social-sciences/Education-for-sustainability
FYI here is the link to the New Zealand Depart of Education’s curriculum website on Education for Sustainability. It is funny how NS has no equivalent nor really ever pays anything more than mild lip service to Education for Sustainability in its curriculum and curriculum guidelines. Though dated, NZ also has Environmental Education curriculum guidelines: http://efs.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources-and-tools/Environmental-Education-Guidelines. The NZ school curriculum is about 50 pages whereas in Nova Scotia every high school course is about 50 pages, covering all levels. If you added all of the NS Curriculum documents together you would have at least 1000 pages, 20 times what New Zealand has. That sends a very different message about the role of the teacher and the concept of education in schools. The vision statement for the NZ Curriculum is:
"Our vision is for young people:
- who will be creative, energetic, and enterprising
- who will seize the opportunities offered by new knowledge and technologies to secure a sustainable social, cultural, economic, and environmental future for our country
- who will work to create an Aotearoa New Zealand in which Māori and Pākehā recognise each other as full Treaty partners, and in which all cultures are valued for the contributions they bring
- who, in their school years, will continue to develop the values, knowledge, and competencies that will enable them to live full and satisfying lives
- who will be confident, connected, actively involved, and lifelong learners.
Design Thinking
(candychang.com)
This was an excellent talk on being innovation in the design of programming and community development initiatives. Design thinking is briefly… don’t plan much. Do some intensive framing up and research on the issues to define the question, then pull people together, brainstorm and then go try stuff and learn from failure and reflection. The idea is that folks get bogged down in long committee processes that stifle innovation… collect wild ideas, try the best ones quick and dirty and then revamp. The one liner is… “to succeed more, we need to fail more.” Some of the info is on the ideo websites. Candy Chang is an urban designer who has done a bunch of creative projects to get community members connecting to each other. Her website pictures a few of them
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