Learning Gets a Green Face

Earlier in the day, they had sharpened their geography skills with a chart of the harbor area, taken account of the weather conditions using cloud, temperature and wave parameters and written in journals about what it means to be a “keeper” of something.

Many of the students had never been on a boat before starting their freshman year at the Harbor School. Now some of them see their career paths heading towards the maritime field, and they look at water in a different way. Quanisha Overby, who wants to be a marine biologist, takes shorter showers now because her first semester work made her think about how much water she uses. It’s water, water everywhere for these kids—their reading, writing and arithmetic are flooded with it.

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Just 12 percent of American adults can pass a basic quiz on awareness of environmental topics, according to a 2005 report [PDF] by the National Environmental Education Foundation. What is the most common cause of pollution in streams? How is most electricity in the United States generated? Most adults do not know, because environmental education only arose in the 1970s and didn’t impact their school days.

There has been a shift, says Cindy Thomashow, who ran the environmental education program at Antioch University of New England for 30 years. Instead of just holding reading class in a circle on the grass, as was common, nature has come inside the classroom as a central topic of study in the past decade or so.

The field has become more popular because of heightened media awareness over the climate change threat and because it inherently combines many sciences, from toxicology to zoology, with social studies such as government and sociology. Betsy Ukeritis, the New York City regional environmental educator for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, points out that studying the environment lends itself easily to inquiry-based, hands-on learning across all school subjects. It fits with recent trends in education that aim to engage kids by integrating subjects and making learning more experiential.

Ukeritis helps connect teachers to resources they need for units about topics like alternative energy, environmental justice or air pollution. She also runs a group of after-school programs that encourage urban children to get involved in a service project, like this spring’s building of butterfly gardens in their neighborhoods and hands-on environmental-science learning like taking apart owl pellets to see what the birds eat.

Environmentally knowledgeable people are 10 percent more likely to save energy at home and purchase environmentally safe products and are 50 percent more likely to recycle than people with less environmental knowledge, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation’s report. Students following a curriculum model often cited as the archetype of environmental literacy, called “Investigating and Evaluating Environmental Issues and Actions,” were three times as likely to score highly on an environmental knowledge test compared to their peers. The participants were also almost twice as likely to have taken recent action on the environment, such as changing a personal habit.

In recent years, schools have added more environmental topics into their curricula and taken steps to reduce their impact by recycling and curbing energy use, for example. Parents and educators now see learning about the environment as an important part of a child’s education. The Foundation’s report found that 95 percent of adults believe schools should teach about the environment, and members of Congress seem to agree.

There’s a bill circulating called “No Child Left Inside,” which has been tacked on to the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. The addition would provide incentives for states to come up with environmental education plans for their schools and set aside funding for training teachers in the field. For now, states are acting on their own to implement environmental education.

Although no one has a way to measure the level of environmental education on a large scale yet, the increasing memberships of various alliances indicate some growth. Groups have sprouted to gather schools into virtual communities by sharing environmentally-themed lesson plans online and providing training and support for green actions like composting, energy efficiency and recycling.

The Go Green Initiative started in 2002 in California and now provides training and resources for every aspect of environmental conservation to more than 1,500 schools. Go Green tracks its progress by calculating how much waste the schools divert from the waste stream. In 2006, the schools kept 3 million pounds of paper and 21,000 pounds of food waste out of landfills by recycling and composting. Their collective actions saved over 10 million gallons of water and a half a million gallons of oil. Every month, 75 more schools join the group.

The Alliance to Save Energy, which is a nonprofit coalition with partners from all sectors, has had a Green Schools program since 1996 that helps more than 100 schools improve energy efficiency each year. Participating schools can save up to 10 percent of their energy costs by simple changes in light-use habits and up to a quarter by retrofitting their light fixtures. Merrilee Harrigan, vice president of Education for the Alliance, says that within the last two years there has been a role-reversal: Instead of the Alliance knocking on schools’ doors, the schools have been coming to them. She thinks the documentary An Inconvenient Truth coupled with climate change coverage and rising energy prices are driving the surge in interest.

Another organization, the Green Schools Alliance, has already amassed 127 schools, mostly private ones, in its first year. It hopes to help schools to attack environmental issues from all sides and provides workshops, online resources and a forum for sharing ideas to help them do so. Member schools pledge to cut greenhouse gases by 30 percent in five years and attempt to become carbon neutral in 10.

Growth of these groups, in number and membership, reflects a greater interest in the environment as a learning tool. Individual schools are reaching far beyond recycling, the usual gateway action into going green.

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Even before reaching the hallways of Calhoun School, a member of the Green Schools Alliance, an environmental project stands out. A small sign at the entrance on 81st Street in New York reads: “No Idling. It’s Unhealthy for the Children and the Environment.” This year’s third grade class was responsible for putting it there.

Earlier in the school year, the students pressed index cards coated with Vaseline against surfaces all over the school to see where the most dust could be found. The filthiest cards, from outside the building, prompted a letter-writing campaign to the Head of School that led to the signs. Three minutes of idling puts out more soot than restarting a vehicle, not to mention the other pollutants it produces and the gas it consumes. Other schools nationwide have instituted no-idling policies, and the EPA offers a national idle-reduction campaign program for school buses to also reduce pollution.