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Summary
Celebrates the work of educators who explore ecological issues in school and non-school settings. Gives examples of ways to impact the thinking of children and adults in order to affirm the values of sufficiency, mutual support, and community.
Ecological Education in Action celebrates the work of innovative educators in North America who explore ecological issues in school and non-school settings. These educators demonstrate how to reshape the thinking of children and adults to affirm the value of sufficiency, mutual support, and community.
Courses in environmental education often focus on scientific analysis and social policy--not cultural change. Children are exposed to information regarding environmental problems and explore such topics as endangered species, the logging of tropical rainforests, or the monitoring of water quality in local streams and rivers. Some adopt manatees or whales, or create school-wide recycling programs. These topics and efforts are without question commendable, however, missing is a recognition of the deeper cultural transformations that must accompany the shift to a more ecologically sustainable way of life.
Contributors to this volume describe courses, programs, or projects that are transformative in nature, aimed at engendering the experience of connectedness that lies at the heart of moral action. The first six chapters describe educational efforts in K-12 schools throughout North America. The next six chapters consider the work of people in higher education and non-formal educational settings and their attempts to instill an ecological perspective into the learning of college students and adult community members. The book thus creates an image of what an ecologically grounded form of education for our own era could look like.
Gregory A. Smith is Associate Professor in the Education Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Education and the Environment: Learning to Live With Limits, also published by SUNY Press, a coauthor of Reducing the Risk: Schools as Communities of Support, and the editor of Public Schools That Work. Dilafruz R.Williams is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Portland State University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Re-engaging Culture and Ecology
Gregory A. Smith and Dilafruz R. Williams
Part 1: K-12 Settings
1. Stories from our Common Roots: Strategies for Building an Ecologically Sustainable Way of Learning
Joseph Kiefer and Martin Kemple
2. Deepening Children's Participation through Local Ecological Investigations
Paul Krapfel
3. From Human Waste to the Gift of Soil
Madbu Suri Prakash and Hedy Richardson
4. From Margin to Center: Initiation and Development of an Environmental School from the Ground Up
Dilafruz R. Williams and Sarah Taylor
5. Exploring Children's Picture Books through Ecofeminist Literacy
Elaine G. Schwartz
6. Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Native Reality
Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley and Ray Barnhardt
Part II: Higher Education and Nonformal Settings
7. Liberation and Compassion in Environmental Studies
Stephanie Kaza
8. Changing the Dominant Cultural Perspective in Education
C. A. Bowers
9. Environmental Autobiography in Undergraduate Educational Studies
Peter Blaze Corcoran
10. Reclaiming Biophilia: Lessons from Indigenous Peoples
Gregory Cajete
11. Creating a Public of Environmentalists: The Role of Nonformal Education
Gregory A. Smith
12. Reassembling the Pieces: Ecological Design and the Liberal Arts
David W. Orr
Selected Programs and Resources that Address Ecological Education
