Building National Programs for Local and Global Impacts
Prepared for the Geographic Learning breakout session of the
National Council for Science and the Environment's
3rd National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment:
Education for a Sustainable and Secure Future
January 30-31, 2003
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thinking about creating learning opportunities for young people and adults that demonstrate concepts and practices of sustainability. The central concept of sustainable development is that we must constantly strive to seek a balance among economic growth, environmental protection and social equity. In addition, the actions taken to meet our needs as a society must be examined to ensure they do not prevent future generations from meeting their own needs. These two ideas are not "mainstream" and many are convinced that until they become more widely understood, we can not have a sustainable and secure future.
Education provides the capacity for society to change. This session will form some specific recommendations about how to go about the complicated task of increasing the capacity of education to include the principles of sustainability. It is worth pausing to consider what we mean by "education." The image that comes first to mind is what is . sometimes called "formal" education or learning that takes place in a setting specifically intended for the organized education of people, namely schools, colleges, or universities. However, our educational enterprise is larger than these formal institutions. Informal education is learning of a less structured manner and takes place in a variety of settings such as youth serving organizations, museums and science centers, and home schools.
The purpose of education is to instill in children and adults a sense that there is a larger narrative that can provide a sense of meaning to their lives. To this end, we teach the history of our Nation and the world, we teach literature and art, we teach the scope of science achievement and math skills, and many other subjects that can broaden the perspective of students. However, there is rarely an effort to teach about our place in the physical world in which we all live and the economic and social value of stewarding natural resources to maintain the capacity for quality living. There is also little attention given to existing political-economic system, its connection to the environment and human existence.
The current educational enterprise, especially in the US is based on a longstanding division of disciplines--biology, social studies, geography, and etc. This arrangement presents the more contemporary discussion and effective study of multi-disciplinary ideas like sustainability. In this session, we will learn about programs that have successfully overcome the disciplinary nature of formal education to focus on sustainability, utilize the wider architecture of education and learning around the world, engage state-of-the art technologies to address issues of sustainability at the community level, and implement through the full spectrum of the educational enterprise.
Yet, to think about how economic, environmental and social variables interact is a multidisciplinary task seldom taught in the formal classroom. Typically, learning is thought to occur mostly inside a class with little credence given to experiential education by youth serving organizations, or museums and science centers. Little though is given to this more independent learning mode as part of the more comprehensive educational enterprise that includes informal or sometimes referred to as nonformal education.
We need the fresh minds of young people to visualize new approaches to old problems and address them with new and innovative solutions using new technology such as geographic information system (GIS). Young people do not have to be convinced of the urgency of sustainable development because they have to live with the decisions made today for decades to come. It is the adults who will need to be taught well. It is the . responsibility of the current generation to set the course and to provide the learning experiences and state of the art tools so our young people may work as a much swifter pace than adults have set. .
Two existing national programs with global and local impacts are analyzed for the those educational strategies that have made them successful. The My Community, Our Earth: Geographic Learning for Sustainability (MyCOE) has cycled through over 200 secondary and university-level projects from 27 countries with over 2,000 registering and 500 mentors from around the world. MyCOE is beginning a second cycle lasting 18 months with new projects due in the Spring of 2004.
The GLOBE project was first implemented in the early 1990s. This program provides students the opportunity to gather and share scientific data about their community with scientists and other classrooms around the country. In this way they learn a sense of belonging to a larger whole, they feel empowered to lead their own education, and they learn about the lives of those in other parts of the world.
Both of these projects have common characteristics worth describing and analyzing for program managers from federal and state agencies, and foundation. These components or resources may be organized in many different ways to educate a population about adopting sustainable practices. The education strategies include:
The following is, a set of draft recommendations to federal and state agencies, foundations and non-governmental organizations interested in supporting and funding education for sustainability:
Prepared by: Gregory Crosby, USDA; Joshua Steams, NOAA, and Robert Ridky, USGS