Poke your head into almost any school today and see how much real environmental education you find going on there. I don't mean a couple of supplemental activities (inside or out) led by one or two valiant teachers, or a nature bulletin board in the hallway. I mean focused, sequential instructional programs as a regular, integral part of the whole curriculum. Not much luck? Try the school's closets. That's where you'll probably find the most evidence. Look for the now unused books, boxes, pouches and kits that were once common to our field, plus the obligatory mimeographed curriculum guide. Chances are good that most of it gets very little use these days. And if a few teachers do include an environmental lesson or unit, chances are good that they still do not systematically address what environmental education set out in the beginning to accomplish, i.e., how life functions ecologically, what that means for people in their own lives, and what those people are going to have to do in order to lessen their impact upon the earth.

Education Vs. Recreation Unfortunately, many of our nature centres view themselves primarily as outdoor recreation facilities instead of education ones. In the U.S. these places are often sponsored by park districts and other agencies who have a very limited grasp of (or interest in) their potential for initiating positive environmental change. Indeed, their governing bodies may actually oppose the very thing that many people naively believe such places have been designed to accomplish. So be careful out there. In reality, a nature centre may be little more than the sine qua non of some commissioner's master plan.

Next, stop by your average nature center or outdoor school and see what you find there as well. The name of the place may have changed, but the staff is probably back to identifying the plants, doing tombstone rubbings, taking Ph tests, reading the weather gauges, making maple syrup, etc. In other words, they are offering a random assemblage of outside activities (yes, with some sensory awareness experiences from Acclimatization and a few similar environmental games thrown in) all tied together by a schedule rather than a desire to achieve particular learning outcomes. Don't be misled either by the name of the centre. It may be called an environmental education centre (in the U.S. perhaps even designated as a national environmental education landmark), but take a close look at what is really going on there. Think about what you see. Are they really accomplishing their objectives? Do they claim to be doing environmental education, and, if so, are they really focusing on our individual connections with the earth's ecological systems and our personal impact upon them?

In any event, it is highly unlikely that you will find much focused, sequential, cumulative environmental education programming at such places. Oh, you may find some familiar words floating around -- we were all quick to adopt the jargon early on -- but very few genuine learning programs were ever developed. Listen to how the staff at one well-known nature centre explained their objectives:

To effectively introduce participants to the beauties and critical importance of the natural environment in their lives.

To motivate and enthuse participants about the natural world around them. Hopefully, this will induce a love and caring, along with the understandings necessary to stimulate them to take better care of that environment for themselves and others.

To give students adventure-discovery oriented experiences which provide fun and excitement while they learn.

Sound good? Unfortunately, what they were doing to accomplish these goals was not using specific learning experiences that focused on how the systems of life here directly support us as individuals and what we must do to change the way we live. No, they were offering classes on orienteering, tree and bird identification, prairie restoration, skiing, maple sugaring, wild edibles, etc. That's right. This centre had the words for environmental education but not the tune (certainly not the harmony).

Our Dog Is Better Than Your Dog I hope you will not conclude that our criticism of other materials in these pages is merely a childish refrain designed to bolster our own image. What we are talking about here are different "animals," with fundamentally different characteristics, not just different approaches. Would we ever use an activity from one of the "projects" in an earth education program? Sure we would, if it did the job we really wanted done, in the way we wanted to do it (Chapter Six will explain how we would go about deciding.)

After you have made the round of our educational institutions, sit down and sift through some of the major so-called environmental education programs that were developed. You are in for a real surprise. You will find that several of them don't even deal with basic ecological understandings, i.e., concepts like the flow of energy, or the cycling of building materials, or the interrelationships of living things. You're asking yourself, "How can someone possibly claim to have a comprehensive environmental education program and not deal directly and effectively with the fundamental base for all life on the planet: the flow of sunlight energy?" That's a good question. What's amazing is that it has bee so seldom asked in our field.

Other projects, as you will see, dealt with some of the concepts (often minor ones like stream development or beach zonation), but never attempted to clarify for their participants how their lives were connected to these processes, nor suggested that they should examine their own lifestyles in light of their new understandings.

A couple of projects included a framework, even placed ecological understandings within it, but then provided only a disjointed, random accumulation of not very stimulating activities to get the job done that they had so carefully identified in their organizational structure. As a result, you often got either the activities with no good framework, or the framework with no good activities. (Of course, the easiest thing to do in such a situation is to construct a framework that is so broad people can fit anything they want within it; thus assuring, I assume, both their success and your own.)

It is also going to be fairly obvious in your examination that for some of these projects the activities were created first and their objectives formulated later. In fact, chances are good that any time you find an activity description that claims to accomplish several objectives simultaneously, you have found an activity that was not developed with a specific learning outcome in mind. Instead, a group of people probably got together to come up with things to do, then figured out what their products were going to achieve afterwards.

You should also check out how these projects placed their activities in the various subject areas while you're at it. I imagine it went something like this -- picture a group of people sitting around a table commenting upon an activity like making maple syrup: "Well, let's see, they figured out the number of buckets of sap it takes to make a jar of syrup didn't they, so it's a math activity." "OK. and they listened to the sap gurgling beneath the bark that means it's a science investigation." "Don't forget when we told them how the pioneers did it. "That's social studies." "True, and they had to write a report on it when they got back, so it fits in language arts as well." Want to guess how someone would justify this as an environmental education activity to begin with? "Well, we discussed multiple forest roles with the kids while they watched the sap boiling down." R-I-g-h-t. . . .

Perhaps the most damaging development though is the assertion you will find in many of these projects that leaders should use the materials in any way they like. In other words, people should just pick and choose whatever catches their fancy, or whatever happens to fit with what they are doing at the time.

Hardly any of us questioned such practices. Very few cried out, "Hey folks, if we are serious about the task of environmental education, then it won't work just to sprinkle a couple of these supplemental activities around like so much spice over a melange of other educational pursuits. We are going to have to put together some focused, sequential programs to get the job done." Why haven't you run across this exhortation in any introduction to the materials you have been analyzing? Probably for much the same reason that you could go to a national conference on environmental education in those days and find everything from orienteering to acid rain on the program. (Or in other words, everything from outdoor recreation to environmental studies.) Everyone was having a good time giving birth to a new profession. it was a heady period, and nobody wanted to step on anybody else's toes. (If you are an orienteering nut, please don't get too upset with me at this point. I think it's a fine activity, really. But its goal is not to help people understand how life functions here, or what that means for them in their own lives, nor how they are going to have to begin examining their lifestyles. More on the acid rain later.)

Before we end our survey, I hope you gathered up a bunch of flyers advertising various events in the field as you poked around in those schools and centres. Examining the announcements for many of our regional workshops and state conferences continues to provide the best empirical evidence for what environmental education actually represents for many of us, i.e., good times salt and peppered with outdoor pursuits, nature crafts, curriculum enrichment activities, awareness games, socialization techniques, and environmental action projects. I think the planning team for one state environmental education conference summed up in a single act the frequent outcome of our namby-pamby, let's be everything to everyone and stay happy approach: they turned down Edward Abbey as a free keynote speaker because he was too controversial.

Continue... Evaluating An Outdoor Centre

Earth Education... A New Beginning Copyright © 1990 The Institute for Earth Education. All Rights Reserved.