Assignment 3 – Educational Meme!
Assignment 5 – Personal Ecological Identity and Eco-Philosophies
Imagine looking through the lens of a camera, but discovering you can’t see anything. The image is blurry. That is because a camera has a small lens inside the viewfinder called a diopter. To correct the picture, you need to adjust the diopter, and then your image will be crystal clear. This is how I view my first weeks in Environmental Education (EE). I had an inaccurate view of EE which has now been adjusted. I thought EE was about recycling, water conservation, climate change and other land-based ideas. This is true, but I found out that EE is also much more. I discovered that ideas I am already passionate about were also part of EE, ideas such as poverty, Indigenous health, youth education, and protection of human rights. I discovered that as a member of the global community, these are also my responsibility. This means being aware of the larger world view, and working towards solutions and preventing new issues.
I have cared about environmental issues since I was a child. My father influenced my ecological identity and my eco-philosophies without either of us ever being aware that he had. He taught me not to leave a footprint in nature, to always leave a campsite better then when I found it, to not pick flowers or plants but to use my camera instead. He taught me about wildlife and tracking, edible and poisonous plants. The outdoors became my place of solitude, refuge and rejuvenation. More recently these ideas have also evolved into an interest in declining bee populations, pollinator gardens and clover yards (to conserve water).
Our first week in EE, I discovered that it encompasses stewardship of our environment with constant education. The idea is to increase our EE knowledge. In our week one forum I learned that this learning is a lifelong process, and that if we want to engage students as lifelong learners and activists, they should be engaged while young.
A research study at the University of Durham (Palmer, 1992) on the development of personal concern for the environment indicates that without a doubt, the single most important category of response at all levels of data analysis in this present project is experience in the outdoors at a young age. The influence of parents, other close relatives, individual teachers and adults is also of paramount importance. (Palmer – Cooper and Neal, 1994)
This learning has informed a different approach to my pedagogy, which will now include a more experiential hands on learning outside of the four walls of the classroom. In our readings and discussions, we discovered many ways to involve students in experiential discovery. In our presentation assignment, we discussed the idea of boil water advisories to teach students the challenge of living without clean water. One idea I considered was having students test water in their communities over several months to discover what was in their water. This idea can be used in local communities. Water examination can also be discussed in regards to other cultures and countries. Other ideas include going outside the walls of the school to explore different ecosystems, to discover for example, the lifecycle of a tadpole or the various plants in an environment. Bird sanctuaries could also offer some interesting exploration. Another idea to involve students includes community or school gardens. Children who may not otherwise have the opportunity would be able to feel the earth, and watch plants grow. In week eleven, I read AN EXPERIMENT IN “GARDENIZING” SCHOOLS, INSPIRED BY WENDELL BERRY. Three years after making a garden the center of school life, the school community has acclimatized to living with the garden as the center of their school day.
For example, we had:
- Kindergartners enthusiastically hunting for earthworms in a newly dug bed.
- Fourth graders coloring yarn with vegetable-based dyes created from garden grown produce and later using the yarn for weaving products.
- Seventh-grade students learning about the physics of levers in an outdoor lab using garden tools.
- Seventh and eighth-grade language students using garden settings to mimic ancient Rome in recounting stories of Romulus and Remus and The Judgement of Paris.
- Art Students incorporating gourds into a garden mosaic and wall hanging.
- Students putting uneaten lunch food in a compost bucket instead of the trash.
- Physical education students travelling through the garden on their running routes.
- Students at recess considering the garden an extension of the playfield, playing hide and seek amid the corn and resting on hay bales.” (Nix, 2009)
As a teacher, I would like to consider a more Indigenous way of knowing to learn from the environment, the community and the human and more then human world. In this way, children could develop a more holistic relationship with the environment and learn relationship, respect and partnership with the earth. Our readings spoke of this partnership as achieving a balance between use and replenishment of all resources. An example of this from an Indigenous perspective would be how First Nations Peoples use only a portion of certain plants which they need for medicine, rather then destroy the whole plant. By considering Indigenous ways of knowing, students and teachers can learn about relationships with the more-than human world. Indigenous Peoples have always considered the land and environment as relations. For example, water is viewed as a relative who must be honored. Water is believed to be sacred, and must be treated with an ethic of thanksgiving. This was an aspect of EE I was unaware of until we worked on our Educational Meme assignments. I had not considered myself as having a relationship with the more-than human world. I have discovered that we have a mutual responsibility to take care of it, and that it in turn has a responsibility to care for us. This way of seeing shows me the level of relationship and connection we have with the earth.
If we are to develop these relationships and teach our students to do the same, we must combine a two-eyed way of seeing the world, combining Indigenous knowledge with our Euro-based education system.
For much of Indigenous education, in my experience occurs within family, clan and other kinship networks over many generations… Learning and teaching never ended over the course of their lifetimes, people invested in education to continually learn to become better relatives to the animals they hunted and to the family and community members they are responsible for sharing harvests with (Whyte, 2019).
One final aspect of EE which requires further examination is Environmental Ethics. I have learned to question some of my personal views of the world and whether or not we have a right to step in and take environmental action. For example, In British Columbia, the government has allowed an ongoing wolf cull in order to protect endangered caribou herds.
“This has resulted in more than 1000 wolves being killed over the past five years… a new study published in the Journal of Biology and Conservation which found the government sponsored kill program has had no detectable effect on reversing the decline of endangered caribou populations” (B.C. Wolf Cull Timeline, 2019). Environmental Ethics questions what right we have to step in and save the caribou.
As an educator, I believe it is important to allow questions of environmental ethics in the classroom. It is our responsibility to provide a safe place for discussion where there is no right or wrong answer. It is important to create opportunities for critical thinking. This means we also need to allow room for opposing opinions and moral struggles. We are all learning together, and sometimes learning can be challenging when we are facing difficult concepts.
I opened this conversation by saying my experience with EE in the beginning was like looking through a blurry camera lens. EE, like photography, takes a lifetime to learn .In photography there are different nuances to discover such as lighting, focus and perspective. EE also requires understandings of different nuances, Indigenous ways of knowing, understanding the more-than human world, and environmental ethics. Each day is an opportunity to develop a new way of knowing and a new way to be involved in our continuing relationship with the world. We are all relations; human world and more-than human world.
References
BC Wolf Cull Timeline. (2019, December 9). Pacific Wild. https://pacificwild.org/the-history-of-the-wolf-cull-in-british-columbia/
Elizabeth Ann Mckinley, & Linda Tuhiwai Smith. (2019). Handbook on Indigenous education. Springer.
Nix, P. (2009). An Experiment in “Gardenizing” Schools, Inspired by Wendell Berry. Ecoliteracy.org. https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/experiment-gardenizing-schools-inspired-wendell-berry
Palmer-Cooper, J. A., & Neal, P. (1994). The handbook of environmental education. Routledge.
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