In response to Module 4.

This year my goal is to promote environmental consciousness within my classroom and school community. Recently, a few trips to the beach have been shocking as the amount of trash that is washed up on the beach is just heart-breaking. Living and travelling in Asia has really opened my eyes to the epidemic that is plastic pollution of our ocean ecosystems and I hope that by leveraging my position as an educator I can help to bring these issues to the forefront of our student’s minds as they grow and learn. They are the future and currently, the future needs help.

 

To begin I wanted to explore some curriculum standards and where learning about the environment and sustainability fit. The ACARA has Sustainability as a cross-curriculum priority. I feel like this fits so well as it can be integrated into a wide variety of subject areas and these should not be separated.

As I currently work at an American Private school I took a similar search into the Common Core Standards and had trouble finding anything about sustainability as a priority for learning. I was coming across the recurring theme of college and career readiness. A ctrl-F search on the webpage showed 6 results for career and 0 results for sustainability, 0 results for the environment.

With a bit more diving in I found a pdf from the Washington State Standards on Integrated Environmental and Sustainability from K-12. This lists 3 standards the 3rd of which is Sustainability and Civic Responsibility. It’s disconcerting that this is only referred to by one state.

I have reached out to a few colleagues in the hope they can point me in the direction of where the environment fits into the Common Core.

If Sustainability is not a priority in our curriculums then how can we imagine it will be a priority for future schools to be built with a consideration of sustainability, the environment and the impacts for the future.

A school that holds sustainability at its core is Green School Bali. Open since 2008, Green School is designed to be sustainable with complete awareness of its impacts on the environment. The physical design includes solar panel, mini-hydro vortex, water filtration system, waste management centre, compost station, aquaponics centre and bio bus.

Obviously, this wonderful school is purpose-built with its entire facilities made to minimise their impacts on the environment and teach its students the importance of environmental consciousness for the future. There are millions of schools which are not purpose-built in this way. Therefore we can’t focus on what our schools are lacking and throw our hands up and say “it’s too hard”. We, as educators, can make habitual changes in our own environments to be role models for our students. Zero-waste snacks, community clean-up initiatives, social studies and science topics that include the community, where does our food come from, where does our trash go? Awareness, not omission, in education, is the key and I believe our students have the capabilities to take it from there with the conversations they take home and small habitual changes they can make for the future.