Sustainability and the Ideal School

Sustainability is the theme which will be integrated through every aspect of our ideal school. Not only is this important for the environment and for our future but it signals the global dimension that our school will have. According to the Department for Children, Schools and Families:

Growing interdependence between countries changes the way we view the world and ourselves. Schools can respond by developing a responsible, international outlook among their young people, based on an appreciation of the impact of their personal values and behaviors on global challenges. We would like all schools to be models of global citizenship, enriching their educational mission with activities that improve the lives of people living in other parts of the world. There is a global dimension to every aspect of our lives and communities. Sustainable development isn’t just about the environment- and it isn’t something we can achieve in isolation. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the clothed we wear link us to people, environments and economies all over the world. The decisions we make on a daily basis have global impact. Schools, through their curriculum, campus and community, have an important role to play in helping pupils to make sense of the complexity of our world and their place in it.

In my research, I discovered so many amazing resources to use as guides in incorporating sustainability into the education of our ideal school. But before looking at the compiled inspirations as to how sustainability will be woven into the curriculum, philosophy, structure and everyday workings of the school, I am providing an array of definitions of sustainability compiled by the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education.

Definitions of sustainability:

"Improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems."
—Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living. (Gland, Switzerland: 1991). (IUCN - The World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Programme, World Wide Fund for Nature).
"Sustainability is 'long-term, cultural, economic and environmental health and vitality' with emphasis on long-term, 'together with the importance of linking our social, financial, and environmental well-being.'"
"Sustainability encompasses the simple principle of taking from the earth only what it can provide indefinitely, thus leaving future generations no less than we have access to ourselves."
"Sustainability may be described as our responsibility to proceed in a way that will sustain life that will allow our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to live comfortably in a friendly, clean, and healthy world."
"Sustainability is meeting the needs of all humans, being able to do so on a finite planet for generations to come while ensuring some degree of openness and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances."
Jerry Sturmer, Santa Barbara South Coast Community Indicators
"Sustainability is a dynamic condition which requires a basic understanding of the interconnections and interdependency among ecological, economic and social systems. Sustainability means providing a rich quality of life for all, and accomplishing this within the means of nature."
Jaimie P. Cloud, Cloud Institute, http://www.cloudinstitute.org/
"A sustainable society is one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support."
Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Sustainability Institute, "Beyond the Limits"
"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future.(Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8. (Frequently referred to as the Brundtland Report after Gro Harlem Brundtland)
"Sustainable Development is positive change which does not undermine the environmental or social systems on which we depend. It requires a coordinated approach to planning and policy making that involves public participation. Its success depends on widespread understanding of the critical relationship between people and their environment and the will to make necessary changes."
Hamilton Wentworth Regional Council
"Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations."
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

National framework for Sustainable Schools

All aspects of our ideal school are being designed ecologically with sustainability in mind. As a class, we have instinctively covered the “8 Doorways” of the National Framework for Sustainable Schools and they include:
*Food and drink
*Energy and water
*Travel and traffic
*Purchasing and waste
*Buildings and grounds
*Inclusion and participation
*Local well-being
*Global dimension

Naturally then sustainability must be integrated throughout the curriculum at every grade level and in every subject to support ecological literacy and sustainable living within and outside of the school. Smart by Nature and The Cloud Institute of Sustainability Education provide some of the best programs that I discovered in my research. I have compiled the guiding principles of their programs to be used as guidelines for how we will incorporate sustainability education into our ideal school.

PROGRAMS

The Center for Ecoliteracy’s Initiative, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability

According to the Center of Ecoliteracy, “society gives schools the responsibility for passing on cultural values” and “whatever happens in schools will have profound effects on the rest of society.” Keeping this in mind, we as future teachers must work to make a difference in the most pressing issues of our times which includes creating a more just and sustainable world. The Smart by Nature program from CEL provides steps that we can take in our school and classroom to come closer to achieving the understanding, community, awareness of interconnectedness and appreciation and reverence for nature that will be needed to create and more sustainable world for us all.

The Smart by Nature Initiative is based on four guiding principles:

Nature Is Our Teacher
To envision sustainable human communities, we turn to nature, which has sustained life for billions of years. Designing communities that are compatible with nature's processes requires basic ecological knowledge, one of the key components of ecological literacy. Ecological literacy fosters a perspective essential to sustainable living: that human needs and achievements are both supported and limited by the natural world. In schooling for sustainability, students are introduced to basic ecological principles and systems thinking — helping them achieve an understanding of the natural world's processes and the ability to think in terms of patterns, relationships, and contexts.
Sustainability Is a Community Practice
Sustainability depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community, as students experience when the school functions as an apprenticeship community. When educators, parents, trustees, and other members of the school community make decisions and act collaboratively, they demonstrate sustainability as a community practice. School communities also have the opportunity to model sustainable practice through the ways in which they provision themselves with food, energy, and other basic needs, and how they relate to the larger communities of which they are a part.
The Real World Is the Optimal Learning Environment
As cooking is best learned in the kitchen, sustainability is best learned in the real world. Whether restoring the habitat of an endangered species, tending a school garden, or designing a neighborhood recycling program, students learn best from active engagement in which their actions matter and have meaning.
In schooling for sustainability, students connect with the natural world and human communities through project-based learning, which inspires them to learn more because they recognize that the knowledge is essential to something they care about. They also learn that they can make a difference, which lays a foundation for responsible, active citizenship.
Sustainable Living Is Rooted in a Deep Knowledge of Place
When people acquire a deep knowledge of a particular place, they develop a sense of caring about what happens to the landscape, creatures, and people in it. When they understand its ecology and diversity, the intricate web of relationships it supports, and the rhythm of its cycles, they also develop an appreciation for and sense of kinship with their surroundings. Place-based education is fundamental to schooling for sustainability. Places known deeply are more deeply loved, and well-loved places have the best chance to be protected and preserved, so that they will be cherished and cared for by future generations.

The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education

The mission of the Cloud Institute states and includes the goals of preparing young people for the shift toward a sustainable future, inspiring teachers and engaging students through meaningful content and student-centered instruction and promoting the idea that K-12 education can substantially influence beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviors related to sustainability and that this is the most fertile ground for helping to shape a society committed to sustainable development.
The CISE also asks that you “Imagine there is a shared understanding that schools have a responsibility to contribute to our individual and collective potential, and to that of living systems upon which all life depends. Schools are learning organizations. The potential of having all of our children in school with their teachers and mentors during the most favorable time for learning and paradigm shifting (for creating new functional pathways) in young people, and that we honor them with transformative learning experiences that prepare them to participate in, and to lead with us the shift toward a sustainable future.”
CISE states that their program is “grounded in the pedagogical traditions of progressive, experiential and constructivist education which is a whole system of inquiry that combines the best of what we know about teaching and learning with the content, core competencies and habits of mind we need to advance in order to move toward a sustainable future.” The following are some of these habits of mind and core content…
Understanding of Systems as the Context for Decision Making
The extent to which one sees both the whole system and its parts as well as the extent to which an individual can place one's self within the system
Intergenerational Responsibility
The extent to which one takes responsibility for the effect (s) of her/his actions on future generations
Mindful of and Skillful with Implications and Consequences
The extent to which one consciously makes choices and plans actions to achieve positive systemic impact
Protecting and Enhancing the Commons
The extent to which one works to reconcile the conflicts between individual rights and the responsibilities of citizenship to tend to the commons
Awareness of Driving Forces and their Impacts
The extent to which one recognizes and can act strategically and responsibly in the context of the driving forces that influence our lives
Assumption of Strategic Responsibility
The extent to which one assumes responsibility for one's self and others by designing, planning and acting with whole systems in mind
Paradigm Shifter
The extent to which one recognizes mental models and paradigms as guiding constructs that change over time with new knowledge and applied insight
What Core Content will Students Study?
Ecological Literacy
Science principles and natural laws that help us to understand the interconnectedness of humans and all of the Earth's systems...
System Dynamics/"Systems Thinking"
Understanding systems as the context for decision-making...
Multiple Perspectives
Truly valuing and learning from the life experiences and cultures of others...
Sense of Place
Connecting to and valuing the places in which we live…
Sustainable Economics
An evolving study of the connections between economic, social and natural systems...
Citizenship (Participation and Leadership)
The rights, responsibilities, and actions associated with participatory democracy toward sustainable communities...
Creativity and Visioning
The ability to envision and invent a rich, hopeful future...

Ideas and Inspirations for bringing nature into the ideal school curriculum

I think it is essential that we bring nature into our ideal school curriculum, or should I say bring our curriculum out into nature. A goal of our school schedule should be to have our students outside of their wonderfully ecological, sustainably built classrooms for at least one-third of the time they spend at school! Teachers should plan to hold outdoor class sessions in our gardens, by our pond, in the meadow and under the trees, in addition to our weekly field trips which will take advantage of all of the beautiful outdoor treasures we are surrounded by here on the central coast.

From “Nature-Deficit Disorder” by Richard Louv

…within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically…yet, at the very moment when more children than ever before are unplugged from nature, science is finally demonstrating how important direct contact with the outdoors is for human development….Environmental psychologists report that exposure to nature…helps protect the psychological well-being of children… Researchers have discovered that children as young as five showed a significant reduction in the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder when they engaged with nature. Schools that use outdoor classrooms and other methods of direct-experience learning are proven to produce students with enhanced skills in problem-solving, critical thinking and decision making. Students are also more engaged in the classroom and more open to conflict resolution…anecdotal evidence suggests that time in natural surroundings stimulates children’s creativity…Perhaps the most important measure we can take to assure the survival of our fellow creatures, large and small, is to prevent the extinction of nature in our children’s hearts.

From “Confluence of Streams” by Zenobia Barlow

Curriculum is anywhere learning occurs. Children find relevance and meaning in learning when they are knee-deep in a creek or measuring the effects of restoration on songbirds and willows. When school communities are deeply engaged in restorative problem solving, they practice a competence essential to sustainability, but sorely missing in many curricula: the capacity for compassion, extending caretaking to all life forms….Children are born with a sense of wonder and an affinity for nature. Properly cultivated, these values can mature into ecological literacy, and eventually into sustainable patterns of living.

By Christina R.

References and Works Cited

Barlow, Zenobia. “Confluence of Streams.” Resurgence Issue 226 July 2005. Available at www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/barlow226.htm.
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. Available at http://www.sustainabilityed.org/
Center for Ecoliteracy and Smart by Nature Program. Available at www.ecoliteracy.org
Global dimension in schools and 8 Doorways of the National framework for Sustainable Schools.
Available at www.teachernet.gov.uk/sustainableschools
Louv, Richard. “Nature-Deficit Disorder.” Resurgence Issue 254 May/June 2009: 14-15.
Suzuki, David. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1999.