The New Zealand Government is quite clear about where “environmental sustainability” sits in a “dislocated by bulleting” list of conflicting goals for our Economic transformation -
Government Goals
Economic transformation
This goal aims to progress our economic transformation to a high income, knowledge-based market economy, which is both innovative and creative, provides a unique quality of life to all New Zealanders and includes:
• growing globally competitive firms
• world class infrastructure
• innovative and productive workplaces, underpinned by high standards in education, skills and research
• an internationally competitive city - Auckland
• environmental sustainability.
I cannot help but imagine how much more faithfully these ideas for economic transformation might have been presented had the governmental policy writers been banned from using dislocated bullet points and were instead charged with presenting their claims in a systems map complete with feedback loops.
But my question is more narrowly focused:
If we are “To give the leaders of tomorrow the knowledge they need to operate in a world rapidly running out of resources and facing the challenges of climate change.” MoE SOI 2007 what learning experiences should we include?
I keep coming back to this question because in 2008 to 2010 we are working with a new ict_pd cluster of five Auckland primary schools looking at the nexus between “environmental sustainability” and ICTs.
I am working to understand how we might best design learning experiences for developing primary student understanding of “environmental sustainability”.
What ought we to include in an “education for sustainability curriculum” for Years 1 to 6?
I am trying to capture notions of Kaitiakitanga (guardianship - all life connected - managing the modern day environment based on a Maori world view) and Environmental Sustainability (balance between human needs and those of the natural environment). My “Planning for Sustainability” Inspiration™ concept map has grown so dense with inter-connections as a result that I find it hard to read it all on one screen.
I figured that the most immediate connection (read authentic) primary students might have with “human needs” was food. So I mapped from field to lunchbox (or with older students from field to burger) against impact on the natural environment with respect to what happened the past, present and might happen in the future ... through
Hunting and gathering lunchbox/burger food/ Growing lunchbox/burger food/ Harvesting lunchbox/burger food/ Preserving lunchbox/burger food/ Transporting lunchbox/burger food/ Marketing and advertising lunchbox/burger food/ Packaging lunchbox/burger food/ Preparing lunchbox/burger food/ Decomposition lunchbox/burger food/ Politics lunchbox/burger food/ Aesthetics lunchbox/burger food/ Economics lunchbox/burger food/ Cultural, country, regional, religious, 21st C lunchbox food/ “We are what we eat” – food chains, food webs, energy flow, digestion, healthy eating, eating smart;
And then I tried to connect this “human needs thinking” with the “economic”, “political” and "cultural" considerations of resource management, environmental law, energy consumption, carbon footprints, peak oil, peak carbon.
To do this I had to unpack the “ecosystem”as community plus environment, and look at the processes – flow of energy and cycling of nutrients, the community (all the species in a given area) and notions of biodiversity, and the balance between autotrophs and heterotrophs; the environment – the biotic and physical surroundings; to consider the way humans impact on all of these – how humans and their desire for a burger or a lunchbox modifies our physical environments and living things through selective breeding, introduced species, monoculture etc etc ... it just gets more interconnected every way you look.
And yet the more I read about the MoE suggested initiatives and approaches for studying sustainability online the less connected and more insular the thinking suggested – the more bullet pointed the ideas suggested.
In truth I find it hard to distinguish “education for sustainability” from the thinking that we used to see siloed as “environmental education” in the 1970's.
All that seems to have happened in the MoE “education for sustainability” curriculum is that the; establishing worm farms, organic gardens and school composting, recycling schemes, school walking maps, local stream studies, re-vegetation initiatives, water cycle study, mapping school energy usage, adopting local environments, endangered species, ecological energetics studies and practical exercises on pollution that used to form part of the Y9 to Y13 secondary biology curriculum in the 70’s has been reframed as “environmental sustainability” topics for Years 1 to 6.
It makes me feel that I am trapped in a curriculum equivalent of the “soft pornography of the flower” all over again.
Environmental sustainability is a notion more complex, deeply connected, integrated, coherent and at a higher level of abstraction than environmental studies – sustainability cannot be understood by a simple focus on school recycling, and we should stop pretending that it can.
Much like the revelations in the New York Times article A Landscape in Winter, Dying Heroically on the Dutch avant-gardener Piet Oudolf (thanks to Alexander Trevi at Pruned (whose blogging sustains me) for the link.) both “gardening” and “sustainable education” can suffer from reductionist and “at a certain moment in time” thinking.
When it comes to creating and designing a garden Piet Oudolf argues
“You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”
Looking out over his perennial meadow, Mr. Oudolf articulated it this way: “You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see. It reminds you of something in the genes — nature, or the longing for nature.” Allowing the garden to decompose, he added, meets an emotional need in people.
“He’s gotten away from the soft pornography of the flower,” said Charles Waldheim, the director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. “He’s interested in the life cycle, how plant material ages over the course of the year,” and how it relates to the plants around it. Like a good marriage, his compositions must work well together as its members age.“Most people think in a formal way: if you put A and B with C, it will look like this — but only at a certain moment in time,” ...
Reading blog posts on Pruned make me boldy claim that what is limiting in most school recycling schemes is the placement (read hiding) of the school compost heap ...
Trevi's The Rich Hour of the Compost Pile is a persuasive post - the school compost heap needs prominence – it belongs in the highly visible entrance lobby of any school – with online webcam to all classrooms if notions of sustainability are to escape the bullet pointed list.
Visitors and school community alike need an opportunity to embrace decomposition and its role in sustainable outcomes.
As for burgers no one does it better than István László G
I think I might launch the SustainED ict_pd cluster teacher workshop with a reading of “Burger King” as a metaphor for dislocation - check it out
Burger King
by István László G
As if their heads were conkers,
brown cracks of light pressing through split cases,
the men eat.
They don’t think about women, the waiting years,
but unravel instead the grease – proof paper,
the mayo bleeding the white napkins,
and sink into the burgers,
pulling away like gauze from half-healed skin.
The food turns in their mouths,
gropes about the palate of bone
as if it might be born in this swallowing,
the men eat, alone.
(translated from the Hungarian by Owen Sheers)
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