Confronting a World of Wounds (continued)
After the social change lesson, I realized in my eagerness to get students thinking about collective action, I had neglected to fully bring the lesson back to students’ own experience and concrete actions they themselves could take. Fortunately there was time to rectify this. Later in the trip, one of my colleagues led an activity in which students made a pledge to themselves to take a climate- related action of their own choosing within the next year. Some students’ pledges centered around lifestyle changes like using less plastic or water. But I was pleased to note others chose collective actions like getting involved in activist groups or starting a climate- focused club at their schools.
The climate change lessons my colleagues and I taught during this 12-day trip represented an experiment in getting students to think about how environmental change actually happens. There are things I plan to do differently next time I teach a similar curriculum. At the beginning of the social change lesson, I wish I had spent more time illustrating the theory of change concept with specific examples. In designing the oil trains role play, I also could have done more to flesh out the characters assigned to each student, which perhaps would have led to deeper conversations about diverse perspectives.
These lessons learned aside, I feel the curriculum my colleagues and I devised for this backpacking trip successfully helped students take the first tentative steps toward envisioning how they might play a role in confronting climate chaos—and not just by participating in Meatless Mondays. I hope they came away with at least a few tools for fighting back against the sense of hopelessness despair that can come from living in a “world of wounds.”
❏ Bibliography
Bigelow, Bill and Tim Swineheart. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, 2014. 410 pages. ISBN number: 978-0-942961-57-7. The “Climate Change Mixer” activity described on pages 92-101 is referenced for this article.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, With Essays on Conservation From Round River. New York, NY: Random House Publishing Group, 1970. Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1949 and 1953. 295 pages. ISBN number: 0-345-34505-3. The quote used in this article, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” appears on page 197.
Schmitz, Paul (December 1, 2014). “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Huffington Post. Retrieve August 7, 2017, from http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/paul-schmitz/how-change-happens-the- re_b_6237544.html. This piece was used as the main source for background information about the Rosa Story.
Nick Engelfried is an environmental educator and activist, currently working on his M.Ed. in Environmental Education through Western Washington University. As part of his work for the degree program, he is participating in a year-long residency working with the North Cascades Institute.
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An outdoor adventure in Whitaker Creek Recreation Area helps develop relationships between participants. Photo by Emily McDonald-Williams
Beyond
Environmental Literacy:
Developing the “Whole Person” By Emily J. Anderson
P
ractitioners in the field of environmental education have a variety of personal reasons for pursuing this work. Many cite their desire to connect youth with nature, introduce youth to careers in the sciences, and
generally, create an environmentally literate society. While we are deeply focused on these goals, there may be even more compelling outcomes under the surface. Environmental educators are creating successful, healthy, contributing members of society. In other words, we are supporting “whole-person development” through our rich educational programs. While environmental educators may recognize these
broader impacts on the youth they serve, we rarely design our programs to support positive youth development outcomes with intentionality. Nor do we measure these outcomes through evaluation and assessment. Rather, we are often highly focused on learning outcomes and meeting science standards. Designing environmental education programs within a research-based positive youth development framework and then measuring
www.clearingmagazine.org CLEARING Fall 2017
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