Once again, American public education is in a wave of reform. Considerable talk occurs at educational conferences and in state congresses about the need for quantifiable results and measurable skills. While it’s true that standards must be high and consistent, educational reform also needs something else: vision. To some extent public schools still help to determine the type of adults that emerge into society. If we complain because adults in our society are careless, insensitive, and lack the imagination necessary for resolving some of our most demanding problems, then we can look back to some extent on the reductive and factory-model learning of the American high school for the past one hundred years. If we worry that our culture lacks environmental awareness, we can look back at the abstract and fragmented way in which we learn.
Rather than blaming a waning school system, we can call for vision on the part of teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone else with the desire to improve the condition of our public schools — and, by extension, the planet. Even for progressive instructors, the ideals of provocative, self-determined learning often give way to the everyday chores of "make-up work," disgruntled parents, bored students, and fights in the hallways. Yet the future is too precious — and too vulnerable, to be decided by default.
During the past two decades, some environmental initiatives have helped curb the once-soaring rate at which species are becoming extinct. Yet we still lose about 50,000 species a year, and millions of tons of waste still creep into our seas and oceans. We still need to shape a society that operates more in harmony with earth’s resources, and that means teaching children and teenagers to understand earth in vastly different ways than we have.
The Current State of Affairs
To take an example from Texas, where I teach, I reviewed the Texas Education Agency’s Scope and Sequence for public education. To its credit, it suggests that high school students should be quite knowledgeable about our natural environment. From kindergarten through eighth grade, students should be able to identify organisms, describe changes in the environment, to name and to classify organisms, and to "manipulate organisms" in lab situations. Technical activities such as measurement, formulation, data-plotting, and analysis continue up to and throughout high school.
High school biology courses — which every high school student is required to take — provide the consistent core of most people’s understanding of earth’s composition and laws. With scrupulous concentration on microscopic observations and unwavering attention to the naming of frog parts, these courses do foster disciplined thinking, in the form of observations, hypotheses, record keeping, and analyses. These skills are important, but they do not foster, in any particular way, an awareness of our connection to the earth. What other types of "earth education" do most Texans — and most other high school students — get? 1995-96 marks the first year that a full year of geography will be required for Texas high school students. This new requirement may encourage both students and teachers to wrestle with the core issue of earth education: relationships between human cultures and their environments. So could an elective ecology course. So could an elective course in marine science or in earth science or in agricultural science.
However, these courses, often deemed as ....the "soft sciences," exist on the fringe, not in the core, of most high school curricula. And even if these classes were required, "content" alone is not enough. Nor are goals or official books filled with lesson objectives.
Today, many of the most innovative reforms for ecology-centered activities and curricula occur at the elementary and middle school levels. Perhaps, as educators and as parents, we assume that teenagers "have gotten their earth education elsewhere, or that a high school really does not have time to fool with thinking about earth, per se, amid the multiple tasks of standardized test preparation, college preparation, vocational education, and the drive to teach students the eccentric rules and laws of a given discipline, be it calculus, chemistry, or world history. But making constructive changes may not be as difficult as we think.
Small Buds: Ways to Begin
Teachers, parents, and activists can start small. If your neighborhood school doesn’t have an ecology club, start one — or recruit someone to do so. If the school doesn’t recycle, begin. Perhaps parents could volunteer along with other parents to organize such efforts. These activities allow students to generate ideas, make decisions, and accomplish goals — in short, to be active learners.
Next, get teenagers outdoors. It alters teenagers’ minds to be outdoors in the middle of a school day, uninhibited by the ceilings of fluorescent lights and dingy-colored cinder block walls without windows. When outdoors I always have a captive audience whether we are hunting for invisible huckleberries, going on a pseudo-Native American vision quest, reading in a field, or looking for topics to ponder and to write about. Geometry teachers can get students outdoors to perceive shapes, to contemplate the possibility of the universe being constructed, in essence, according to geometrical principles. Foreign language students can get outdoors to practice identifying objects of the natural world in their Spanish, French, German, or Latin nomenclatures.
Loren Eiseley once wrote that he has to travel only to an unattended lot near his backyard to find evidence of life and death and rebirth. I suspect similar evidence could be found along the fringes of soccer fields. Perhaps by the time children become teenagers, spending time in fields and woods and gardens will seem what it should: natural and worthy of sustaining.
High school biology teachers in Texas and elsewhere are developing biology curricula under the self-descriptive project title "Biology Outdoors." These educators conduct many of their experiments and field research outdoors, with few advanced facilities. Teachers in urban areas with buildings surrounded by asphalt can take advantage of the several nature centers in urban areas throughout the nation.
If outdoor adventures are out of the question, then teachers can make small changes or additions to their curriculum. Writings by naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Brian Lopez, Loren Eiseley, and John McPhee offer wonderful insight into the natural world and provide catalysts for students to begin reflecting upon their environment. Annie Dillard has written compelling essays on otherwise seemingly banal topics such as moths in a jar, roaches and evolution, and the mating habits of praying mantises. No biology class should be without them. I also know a biology teacher who had her students read Michael Crichton’s Congo (before the movie came out) so that they could make presentations and lead critical discussions on the environmental and ethical questions the novel raised.
The Roots I:
Redefining Literacy as Cultural and Ecological
Thoreau noted that when farmers seek to transplant a tree, they must start not with the branches but with the roots. So, too, in reforming education we have to dig down to the roots, to the foundations — that is, to our assumptions about knowledge, intelligence, learning, and literacy — in order to make real change last. So even in science, we must ask, what is literacy?
A few years ago, E. D. Hirsch challenged our assumptions about "cultural literacy" in his landmark book of the same name. Hirsch describes our youths’ and adults’ poor knowledge concerning our "common heritage" of history, mathematics, literature, the sciences, and geography. Hirsch’s proposal? Schools should prioritize students’ knowledge of well-known authors, the nation’s capitals, and of major figures and events. Such knowledge will give us a "common literacy," Hirsch says, and, therefore, will improve our ability to communicate, to understand information, and to get along.
Though well-intentioned, Hirsch’s notions of literacy are limited to his thoughts about our cultural heritage. However, one group in California is digging to the roots of this issue. The Center for Ecoliteracy was founded by physicist and author Fritjof Capra, whose book The Tao of Physics has helped popularize new discoveries in biology and physics. Capra’s Center provides guidelines as well as support for teachers, scholars, parents, and others interested in increasing humanity’s knowledge and understanding of ecology. The Center’s plan emphasizes knowing the "principles of ecology," such as interdependence, diversity, ecological cycles, and sustainability.
Carole Cooper, director of Global Learning Communities, and educator Ed Clark outline ways to reorient classroom activities to help students understand the concepts of ecoliteracy. For instance, interdependence — the concept that all members of an ecosystem are interconnected and depend on one another — also applies to productive practices in the classroom, the school, and the community: people depend on one another for life-long learning. Recognizing the need for diversity applies not only to the survival of an ecosystem but also to the healthy environment of a classroom, in terms of diverse learning strategies, learning styles, and culture.
The Center for Ecoliteracy is prepared to facilitate school districts’ reforming efforts from the roots up and with ecology at the center.
We begin to understand, then, that literacy involves human culture and agri-culture, human systems and ecosystems.
The Roots II:
Interdisciplinary and Holistic Education
"Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves," Chief Seattle allegedly said about 150 years ago. This kind of thinking, often called "systems thinking," requires a different classroom structure than most of us have known.
If we wish for students to recognize that their actions relate intrinsically to the planet’s other myriad elements and creatures, then we have to develop curricula that can foster such ways of thinking, imagining, and understanding. One promising development is in holistic courses and projects which demand the transference of skills and knowledge in one discipline to be applied to another.
Parents, principals, and teachers would be on weak footing if they claimed that such non-departmentalized courses were out of step with higher education and the "real world." Poet, scholar, and professor Frederick Turner argues for an academy which develops interdisciplinary, "unified" minds. If we wish to communicate to students that the universe is unified, he argues, then the metaphor of our educational system should reflect principles of unity — not of fragmentary specialization and departmentalization. "Science teachers ought be poets," he writes in an article in Harper’s, "and it goes without saying that poets must be scientists."
Faculty at San Francisco State University apparently agree, since science and humanities professors have developed — over the past sixteen years — two dozen courses that bridge science and arts/humanities. Even The College Board (the organization that develops the SAT) has organized The National Center for Cross-Disciplinary Teaching & Learning. This center hosts a number of forums and conferences in which experts from various fields, professors, and high school teachers meet, discuss, and collaborate on secondary education "modules" for cross-disciplinary studies.
In the same vein, an English teacher and a biology teacher I know have designed a new team-taught course which revolves around units such as "Ethics and Humanity," "Community Responsibility," "Symbiosis," and "Fate." Romeo and Juliet, for example, assumes new dimensions when students are learning simultaneously how one action can have serious consequences on the environment. Other projects take students outdoors to conduct field research on DeSoto’s ecosystems. These teachers even have planned activities which allow students to perceive connections between the intricate patterns in DNA and in metered poetry.
Teachers at other high schools also have developed their own team-taught units which demand students to transfer concepts in skills from class to class. At one high school, for instance, biology, English, math, and history teachers have the same groups of students. A unit of study concerning a river, for example, requires students to conduct biological experiments on the condition of a local river.
Experiments on and studies of water quality require mathematical mastery, while historical research as well as oral histories on the river’s role in the community bones up students’ skills in history and English. After reading and studying the important political and symbolic aspects of the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, English students also prepare newsletters to inform peers and community members of studies, findings, and proposals to help protect the river’s condition. The interdisciplinary unit requires students to develop skills of cooperation (thus, experiencing the ecological principle of "interdependence") as well as skills to address real problems concerning the environment. As a bonus, students experience the learning process within broad, meaningful, and enjoyable contexts.
Similarly, a middle school in Dallas recently won a $5,000 prize from State Farm Insurance for a project involving seventh- and eighth-grade students in social studies, English, math, and science. They conducted field study and historical research on White Rock Lake — a lake in desperate need of care and repair — and produced a video for cable television. Through this interdisciplinary project, they presented a number of solutions to Dallas’ City Council.
With imagination, desire, and vision, teachers can develop similar units and courses. "Earth and Art," "Economy and Ecology," and "Planetary Geometry" are among a few of the course titles they might dream up. Course requirements can be easily adapted to team-taught, interdisciplinary, and problem-solving units and courses. The universe does not exist in departments and "periods." Why should our education?
Reform or Revision?
We can change school schedules, add days to the school year, create innovative courses, and establish new mandates and goals for the year 2000 or for the year 2050. Yet, these changes are meaningless unless they accompany changes in world view. Emerson wrote in his essay "Man the Reformer," "What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating the great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life?" Perhaps school reform would be easier if we possessed the clarity and renewed energy of a new day, each day. Few of us do; people entrenched in systems do not alter easily.
If we can only agree, though, on the dire necessity to change our well-worn patterns of living and of consuming, we can begin to initiate effective change through our public schools. Entrenched as we are, we can talk and walk, act and pray, parent and teach with this vision.