Tag: Sustainability Education


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education: Partnering Schools With Their Communities

7
November


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the final post of a three article series that provides Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

The Cloud Institute offers several services, including long-term consulting, curriculum design and development, and Education for Sustainability workshops. Which offering is the most popular and which have you seen result in the most significant change for clients?

The most whole system work we do is with school districts and their communities learning together for a sustainable future.  We call those our Sites Learn initiatives. Examples include the nine sites around the country that are members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) Education Partnership that Peter Senge and I created with a team of colleagues, and also our New Jersey Learns program which is funded by The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and is made up of a growing number of sites around New Jersey that participate in Sustainable Jersey.

The next level on the continuum is our Districts Learn work. We work with individual districts and consortia of districts to Educate for Sustainability. The best example of that is our work with seventeen districts through the Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES on a massive and multifaceted EfS initiative that is grounded in a core set of web-based exemplary units of study across all grade levels and disciplines (www.pnwboces.org/efs). Next, we work with individual schools (Schools Learn) from PS 208 in Harlem to the Denver Green School, and from Trevor Day School in NYC to Marin Country Day School in Corte Madera, California, to name a few.

Having said all of that, indeed a big part of the work we do involves professional development and coaching of teachers, leadership development and organizational learning consulting and planning with administrators, and work with educators to embed EfS into the core curriculum. Most K-12 schools are new to EfS. A small minority have been working on it since the early 1990s.

We usually begin a relationship with a school or district by providing an introduction to sustainability and education for sustainability in order to achieve three outcomes: 1) A shared understanding among the stakeholders of sustainability and EfS; 2) A personal rationale for educating for sustainability, and; 3) Participants will become inspired and hopeful about contributing to sustainability through education. All the educators that I have ever met without exception want what is good for kids. It is a deep and fundamental aspiration to contribute to the health and well-being of our children and of future generations. It is a lot of work—especially in the beginning—but it is worth it.  Our children are worth it.

 

What is the most important actionable item you would like readers to take away?

Schools and communities must learn together for a sustainable future.   Demand a  whole systems approach to Education for Sustainability in your schools and community.

EfS is designed to solve more than one problem at a time and to minimize the creation of new problems.  We know that when schools employ this approach over time in partnership with their communities, and implement  EfS in the day to day actions of school community members and explicit instruction,  EfS improves student achievement, increases civic engagement, increases young people’s sense of efficacy,  and improves children’s health and other sustainable community indicators including air quality, waste reduction and energy conservation.  Without children and young people engaged in, and contributing to community initiatives, sustainable communities cannot exist.

Contribute to sustainability through collaborative initiatives that are developed through school and community partnerships.  Education for sustainability is a whole systems approach to education.  Lasting transformation in education requires innovation at the curricular, institutional, and community levels.  By linking schools and communities, kids and adults are thinking differently, learning and working together—all for the future we want.

 A healthy and sustainable future is possible.  Call us.  We will help you educate for it.


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The Cloud Institute for Sustainability: Educating for Sustainability with K – 12 Students

21
September


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the second of three posts that provide Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

Can you please explain the distinction between educating about sustainability and educating for sustainability?

What people don’t always realize is that educating for sustainability is not always about sustainability. It is first and foremost about developing the knowledge and the ways of thinking that will help us to thrive over time.

It is clear that people educating for sustainability do not all have a shared vocabulary with shared meanings.

The Cloud Institute’s framework for Education for Sustainability is designed to contribute to our individual and collective potential and that of the living systems upon which our lives depend.

When we educate about sustainability we treat sustainability as a topic. In my opinion, its use strictly as a topic is limiting and does not allow for what I believe is its highest and best use. To us, sustainability and regeneration are the names for the desired condition we are educating for. I think the greatest value to us is that the concepts of sustainability and regeneration are aspirational and measurable destinations.

Why have you chosen to focus your efforts on K – 12?

The Cloud Institute believes that a sustainable community agenda is unsustainable if it doesn’t formally involve all the children, young people and their teachers. We unite schools and communities to learn and change together  to instigate, sustain, and scale up the innovations and best practices that contribute to sustainability and that characterize Education for Sustainability. We can accelerate the shift toward Sustainability by engaging the schools in Education for Sustainability and securing the role of children and young people as participants, innovators and leaders. We believe that K-12 education can substantially influence knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors related to sustainability. This is the most fertile ground for helping to shape a society committed to sustainable development.

In the most serious conversations about sustainability, I have not detected a shared understanding of the role of education, particularly K-12, in contributing to the shift toward a sustainable future. I have spoken to system dynamics modelers who assume that the time horizon for the return on an investment in K-12 education is twenty years. When I hear that, I ask them, “Do you know any children?!” In my experience, it takes children and young people very little time (especially compared to adults) to turn what they’ve learned into action at the local level.  On average, they are much more responsive, creative, and quicker to make change than we adults are.

Many people have given up on public schools and yet we keep sending the majority of our children there. It is a bad scenario. We can either give up on them and create something else instead, or we can transform them into learning organizations that contribute to our children’s individual and collective potential and that of the living systems upon which our lives depend  (we actually like a bit of both.) We cannot, I would argue, continue to send the majority of our nation’s children to places for thirteen years of their lives that we have abandoned financially, psychologically and emotionally.  That’s just a disaster. That’s part of the problem. I’ll say that upfront.

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Sustainability Education at The Cloud Institute: A Different Way of Thinking

13
September


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the first of three posts that provide Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

When and how were you inspired to develop “a different way of thinking”?

[JPC] – I was in one of the first experiments in global education from the 6th-12th grades.  As a result, my work began at the age of 11.  I grew up in Evanston, Illinois.  Our teachers were influenced by Buckminster Fuller and other luminaries of the time. The gist of the experiment was to prepare us to thrive in the 21st Century, to become agents of change and inventors of the future we want.  They provided us  with learner-centered, constructivist methodologies  that produced reflective, flexible and creative questioners, systems thinkers, lateral thinkers, media literate, self-regulated learners prepared to deal with rapid change, increasing complexity and interdependence, uncertainty, diversity, and global challenges, including the environment, peace and security, human rights and human development.

In middle school, I could not have predicted that I would be a founder of the field of Education for Sustainability.  The term sustainability and sustainable development, as we understand it today, would not be coined until 1987, nineteen years later, and the field of Education for Sustainability would not be born until 1992 in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21—some 24 years later.

I grew up to become a Global Educator because that’s what I knew.  In 1987, when the word sustainability appeared in a U.N. report, Our Common Future, I thought to myself, “That’s the name for the desired condition I want to educate for.” I had been tracking the state of the planet data since 1968—since I was 11.  Now I had a word to describe what I saw:  The situation was un-sustainable for humans and other species of plants and animals with which we share the planet.  Sustain-able seemed like a better idea.  Once I had the word, I had the concept. Once I had the concept, I knew I needed to educate for sustainability.

Shortly thereafter, I came across an Einstein quote that we use daily: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that we used to create them. “

 

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Sustainability Education at Enclave Harbour

25
May

This article is cross-posted on Environmental Leader.

In my recent article, The Promise of Sustainability Education, I discussed the importance of introducing whole systems thinking and environmental sustainability into the US educational system. There are a variety of organizations using a range of methods to bring sustainability pedagogy into today’s schools. In this interview, David Miller from Enclave Harbour discusses the role virtual worlds can play in the transition to sustainability education.

MC: How long have you been developing virtual worlds and when did you get the idea to create Enclave Harbour?

DM: I started working in virtual worlds at the end of 2006 when Second Life was all the frenzy in the media.  I had been doing Blender 3D, an open source 3D animation program, as a hobby and saw the opportunity to make buildings that could be used by others. My first project was an art gallery for a Norwegian artist that was having a real life art reception and wanted it mirrored in Second Life.

I was interested in using Second Life for teaching science but it was far too expensive and Second Life does not allow anyone under 16 years of age to enter. However, I did use Second Life to teach eLearning developers how to “film” 3D animation, much like you would do with the much harder to learn Blender 3D.

MC: What are the advantages of teaching earth science “in world”?

DM: Immersion and engagement. The concepts I have students explore in these virtual science field trips have traditionally been taught with illustrations or photographs in a text book. If you are lucky, then maybe you can see a video or even a 3D projector image. All we are doing with Enclave Harbour is taking that illustration or photo and making it a 3D model that a student can walk around in.

It’s more fun to have an avatar and walk around a desalination plant or a landfill then to read about it. Kids love to explore, even if it is just virtually. Most kids won’t ever participate in a field trip to hydro-electric plant or calculate the kinetic energy of a toilet they flush atop of the world’s tallest building as captured by a wastewater turbine.

You can also teach the fantastical. We have a space station that teaches closed-circuit systems like the water cycle and the carbon cycle and we also have a spaceship that serves as a way to discuss future energy possibilities – those topics that are just fun to explore.

“In-world” activities can also be enjoyed by those at brick-and-mortar schools, virtual schools, and home schools.

MC: Was it a conscious choice to use a variety of alternative energy solutions within Enclave Harbour?

DM: We teach Environmental Science topics using Life, Earth, and Physical Science principles taken from the National Science Education Standards (NSES) and from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In this mix it seems appropriate to teach all forms of energy being used. We teach science and not policy and in this respect there is no right or wrong energy.

However, since we do this with an eye towards closing the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), we do present activities designed in a way that students do their own research on current events and can write papers on differing topics. The goal is for them to uncover various sides of issues and to question assumptions presented by the media. They will make up their own minds about energy solutions and be better equipped to make sound decisions regarding them as they become older.

MC: How can youth best be educated on sustainability?

DM: I think that today’s youth is on the verge of this question becoming a moot one for them. We have seen significant changes in the last five years in the automobile industry and recent incentives, such as San Francisco allowing the free charging of electric cars, that are now making these things a day-to-day reality and not simply novel.

I believe that science literacy can help us become sustainable in our lives and our decisions. Science literacy in the US is lower than in many countries and we are now aware of this. Science needs to be restored to its former glory of the days when dreaming of space travel was something many kids did. Today we have no planned manned missions and the lunar walk is from a time way before today’s kids were born. The romantic side of science is not as bright as it could be.

Personally, I blame standardized testing to an extent because it removes some of the reward for passionate science teachers who want to teach but get ranked on their ability to have students memorize facts. Rote memorization might look good for test results but we can see that this does not inspire great science nor does it allow the US to lead the world in science innovation.

I taught three years at the secondary level and seven at college but I would not teach secondary science unless it was at a very progressive school that valued enthusiasm, passion, and real life experience.

MC: What is the most important actionable item you would like readers to take away?

DM: Question science that you hear in the media. It is sometimes pseudo-science presented to further a political agenda that may sound plausible but falls apart upon cursory inspection.

Science is all around us, it’s in your cell phone, the water you drink, the transportation you use, and science is magical and sometimes invisible. From pollination to hurricanes to sail boats, wind is an important “thing” that we have studied and understand very well but have you ever actually seen the wind?

 

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The Promise of Sustainability Education

26
April

This article is cross-posted on Environmental Leader.

The educational system in the United States once ranked among the best in the world, but the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) most recent statistics show the US produced only average proficiency scores when compared against other countries in science, reading, and math. We now have a unique opportunity to regain our practice of effective teaching and prepare our youth for a rapidly changing future by incorporating environmental sustainability and social responsibility into all aspects of our educational system.

The current paradigm which pushes businesses and people to do more with less, and at increasing speeds, is transforming into a model aligned with the laws of nature. In this new world there is virtually no waste and people and planet are treated as more than raw materials, they are honored as the fabric of life itself. In order to make the transition, our youth must be exposed to and educated on whole systems thinking with the natural world as the ultimate guide. While a handful of school districts, private institutions, and universities are making great progress, many continue to teach more or less as they have for years.

A positive example for how to develop sustainability pedagogy can be found at The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. This New York City based non-profit has developed a holistic approach that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision. The idea that a person’s surroundings will have to transform in order to support the much needed true shift in our cultural values is a powerful concept and exactly what will be required. Just as important is the Cloud Institute’s distinction as to the focus of their work. They are involved in “educating for sustainability, rather than about sustainability.”

Founded in 1995, the Cloud Institute offers a variety of services designed to enable sustainability, including long-term consulting, teacher workshops, and curriculum development. A great example of their work can be seen in The TerraCycle Curriculum Series. Lesson plans, story books, and student handouts are free to download and provide ready to use materials for educators. The Natural Laws and Principles of the Materials Cycle curriculum uses a story, Where Do Apples Go, to explain what happens to organic and non-organic material when thrown on the ground outside. The Healthy Commons program introduces children to the concept of shared resources, such as air, water, and community parks and begins to explore the responsibility we all have for these communal necessities of life.

While organizations like The Cloud Institute are focused solely on educating for sustainability, others include environmental protection as one piece of a larger mission. The Marion Institute works with communities, schools, and individuals on green economics and environmental education in addition to health, healing, and spirituality. They have launched four Seed to Table programs that link classroom experiences with the time children spend in the garden. The Marion Institute also aids schools in developing composting programs and providing field trip opportunities to visit local farms and green industries.

Sustainability field trips of another kind will soon be possible at Enclave Harbor. This well-designed virtual world has a variety of alternative energy and environmental science activities from solar-powered cargo blimps to tidal turbines and even a landfill. A workbook guides students through life, earth, and physical science virtual field trips with a focus on sustainability.

One well known real world school that has incorporated sustainability in a variety of ways is Phillips Exeter Academy. They developed an environmental mission statement in 2004 and, in 2005, fourteen staff members participated in a four-day workshop to learn how to infuse their teaching with environmental education. Today Phillips Exeter offers eight courses with a strong sustainability focus that cover topics ranging from English to science to religion. Students also have the opportunity to leave campus and explore sustainability in the larger world. Available programs are based in the mountains of Vermont; in Callan, Ireland; and at The Island School in the Bahamas.

While on campus, students who are interested can become Environmental Proctors. E-Proctors, as they are known, have a variety of responsibilities, including educating their fellow dorm mates on energy efficiency and conservation along with placing the composting pail outside the building each morning for pickup. Charging youth with these types of responsibilities has numerous advantages. The E-Proctors gain valuable experiences championing and managing environmental initiatives by promoting and supporting sustainability measures to their peers. Challenging students to live a life full of green measures solidifies important environmental habits, such as composting and turning off lights, preparing the Phillips Exeter community for stewardship of the natural world long after graduation.

Today, youth who are interested in sustainability have the opportunity to further their studies in both undergrad and graduate programs. Many traditional business colleges include triple bottom line course work and there has been a steady increase in “green MBAs.” The Presidio Graduate School offers both an MBA and MPA in Sustainable Management. Their integration of sustainability into every course ensures students are steeped in environmental and social responsibility. Being surrounded by green class work and real-life examples of sustainability in action allows students to become business leaders that see the world in new way.

The promise of sustainability education is a well trained, insightful workforce that views the natural world as a precious resource and all people as worthy of fair and equal participation in the global economy. If our nation looks to the examples of sustainability education currently in use and invests time and money into incorporating these holistic, whole systems ideals into a redesigned teaching model, our lagging educational system will begin to produce results that will benefit the entire world.

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