Environmental Learning and Experience
An Interdisciplinary Guide For Teachers (2007)
Introduction and Background
Do you want to find a better way to organize your teaching and lesson planning?
Do you want to be part of positive change from within the education system?
Do you want to empower your students to become environmentally responsible?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this document is for you. It is provided to assist British Columbia teachers of all subjects and grades to integrate environmental concepts into teaching and learning. Designed as a support framework to guide teachers in their education planning, the guide also aims to support the implementation of many of the Integrated Resource Packages (IRP’s) and will be complemented by web resources to support environmental learning in diverse subjects like science, social studies and language arts. It is your guide to interdisciplinary practice — using the environment as an organizing theme.
This guide also builds on an earlier Ministry of Education document, Environmental Concepts in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers, first published in 1995. This guide and the preceding document were developed from the belief that students should understand both how and why the environment has an impact on their daily lives, and what kind of an impact their daily lives have on the environment. This guide builds on this belief with an integrated approach towards environmental learning because so many school subject areas touch on environmental topics or experiences in some way. By emphasizing that the study of environment is not a unique subject area, it is hoped that students will come to understand how their actions affect both local and global environments.
Since the first B.C. framework document in 1995, there have been many developments in the field of environmental education. These developments have been informed by International agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, Montreal and Johannesburg Summits on Sustainable Development, and the more recent proclamation of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). This momentum has been accompanied by a great deal of research on how people learn in a variety of disciplines. Still, all environmental learning (whether it be in the form of Environmental Education, Ecological Education or Education for Sustainable Development) aims to integrate environmental thinking and ideas into students’ everyday lives. In this way, it is hoped students will begin to realize how they can take personal responsibility and leadership in creating a more environmentally sustainable way of life.
This revised document offers a conceptual framework for introducing environmental learning in all classrooms, while providing several general principles of teaching and learning to guide teachers in designing integrated activities for a variety of learning contexts. The document provides a number of perspectives around which environmentally-focused lessons may be developed. These multiple and overlapping perspectives can help teachers to facilitate students’ varied ideas about the environment. For example, students’ beliefs about the environment could incorporate other forms of cultural knowledge, such as aspects of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), practised by the first peoples of an area or region of the province.
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