controversy and complaint, but students simply must gradu- ate from our schools as adults capable of making smart decisions based on a high level of environmental literacy. Schools must become hotbeds of environmental activity; and when the third wave hits, they will be required to be. The trick for environmental educators is to embrace the issues while not taking sides. We’re not advocating for the issue: we’re telling stories.
2. Tell bigger, better stories
People are storytellers — we like to have the com-
plex world organized into comprehensible storylines. But environmental educators, shying away from political overtones, have never fully taken advantage of the power of storytelling with big issues. Take global warming as an example. Without express-
ing an opinion about global warming, you can become a storyteller, walking your students through the issue as if you were interpreting a forest, offering some of the measur- able data that’s been gathered, presenting the likely effects, noting solutions, describing which stakeholders have lined up for and against the issue — and for what reasons. You’re simply telling the story of global warming, without having to advocate for a particular point of view. Take any issue, and make it a story. Interpret it. Society
needs someone to hold its hand and walk it through large, complex issues, and this is naturally the job of educators. We not only need better stories, we need bigger stories.
3. Make community connections
Environmental issues are happening out there in the big, wild world. To teach these issues effectively, we must take the classroom out there — and bring the world into our classrooms. To stay with our example of global warming, say you have taught the students the basics of the issue and assigned them to read one of the many excellent books on the subject that have come out recently, maybe Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. You then invite into the school a panel of adults — a university professor, a TV meteorologist, a utility executive, an activist — to be interviewed by your students, who have prepared a series of questions based on their reading and studies. Maybe you even hold the event at school in the evening, the students bring their parents, and it is covered by local newspapers (for which students have written press releases) and taped by the school’s audio-visual group for broadcast on public access television. Soon after the event, the students
themselves might debate the school’s proper response to global warming — aggressive recycling, solar panels, compact fluorescents — their discussions now informed by a deep understanding of the issues and the variety of possible solu- tions. Imagine them actually creating the
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action plan. You haven’t told them what to think, but exposed them to knowledge, and they have educed what they need from the issue: they have been educated in the highest sense of the word. The environment is the big
world outside and it should be the single most exciting part of the school curriculum. To teach EE, you’ve got to strengthen community connections.
4. Exploit technology
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average American child spends almost 40 hours each week consum- ing technology: watching TV, playing computer games, listening to CD players and iPods, and IMing and Facebook- ing friends. Technology is a powerful force, its own tidal wave that has already altered the cultural landscape — and it is here to stay. Yet environmental educators share a neo-Luddite bent,
interested in getting kids away from computers and into nature, away from the virtual world and into the real one, off the web and into the web of life. These are worthy aims. But the public is technologically sophisticated, expects to find technology everywhere, and not only knows how to use technology to understand the world, but wants to use tech- nology for that purpose. We need to practice a very delicate balancing act between failure to use technology, which renders us quaint and obsolete, and overuse of technology, which renders us shallow. The middle ground — wield- ing technology as a tool to educate, illuminate and perhaps entice — is hard to find, but increasingly necessary. In environmental education, as elsewhere, technol-
ogy connects the global village and makes it a small world after all. Project GREEN and Project GLOBE, for example, have students measuring environmental parameters, enter- ing the data on spreadsheets and sharing that data with students around the world. Classes participating in Cornell University’s FeederWatch program put bird feeders outside the classroom windows, monitor the birds that visit, send in their data to the project’s website, and watch the north- ern migration of, say, Baltimore orioles on the site’s map. Through such applications, we’re exploiting technology for science, connecting our students to the real world, and turn- ing them into citizen-scientists. Technology is here to stay, and it is not the
enemy. As environmental educators, we need to stand with our feet firmly planted in the real world while embracing cutting-edge technology for our own purposes.
5. Become culturally fluent
People who do environmental work tend to have a bias against popular culture. After all, popular culture is a relentless jugger- naut dedicated specifically and solely to the
marketing of products and promotion of con- sumerism. Since the juggernaut is anti-environ-
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