Teaching for a healthier Earth: sustainability education has young students seeing the world in a new way

Instructor, March, 2004 by Susan Santone

When you think about the future, what kind of lives do you imagine for your students? We all have hopes for our students--hopes for future happiness, good jobs, and success. We want their world to be a healthy, stable, and peaceful place. A growing global movement suggests that teaching children about sustainability, or living within the limits of the Earth's resources, is one way we can help the next generation prepare for the best possible future.

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Sustainable living involves balancing our economic, cultural, and environmental demands to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future. It means not using more resources than the Earth can reasonably replace. Currently, humans consume natural resources and produce air, water, and land pollution at rates that are unsustainable--we overtax the earth.

Policymakers and scientists believe that the combined impact of population growth, consumption patterns, and cultural instability will likely damage the quality of life for generations to come. Many believe the answer is to implement global education for sustainability (EFS).

What is Education for Sustainability?

Teaching for sustainability means teaching students to think about how individuals and groups (such as families, towns, and nations) can have a good quality of life without exceeding ecological limits. You might think, "Sustainability? It's not on the test. And I really don't have time for it." But before you dismiss it, consider this: education for sustainability is not another content area to fit in. It is an overall approach to teaching that equips students to meet a larger goal: a healthy, prosperous, and peaceful world for today and tomorrow.

Sustainability education can be described as a stool balanced on three legs: the economy, the environment, and social equity (the "three Es"). These areas embrace concepts from civics, biology, geography, history, math, and language arts. So sustainability fits right into the subjects and themes we are already teaching.

Proponents of EFS have identified a set of knowledge, skills, and values students need. These include a deep and critical understanding of how ecological, social, and economic issues are linked; the ability to learn, create, and work in a community; the desire and motivation to work for individual and collective well-being; and respect for self and others.

These traits are often identified by teachers when discussing responsible citizenship. Now they can be extended to lessons on how our lives affect the future of the planet. The examples below show how three Michigan teachers are applying sustainability as a model for teaching and learning.

Case 1: Defining Quality of Life

At Thurston Elementary in Ann Arbor, Michigan, third-grade teacher Jessica Anderson connects natural science, social studies, and beginning economics in a unit on life values. She begins by asking: "What do we need for a quality life?" Answers typically include food, clean water, education, and entertainment. By categorizing these responses, students discover that humans have different kinds of needs: physical, material, emotional, and intellectual.

Next, her students differentiate between needs and wants by prioritizing things such as water, shelter, love, school, and toys. Students identify and talk about what influences their wants, including media and friends.

Anderson then poses another question: What resources are necessary to meet our needs? To answer this, students use concept maps to illustrate the human, natural, and capital resources that support a need they identified. Students might discover, for example, that education requires teachers, friends, and family (human resources); books, computers, TVs, and pencils (capital resources); and trees, lakes, and plants (natural resources). Mapping resources introduces students to important economic terms, and also helps them to understand how different types of resources are related.

Case 2: Exploring Ecosystems

At East Middle School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, sixth-grade science teacher Gloria Voght teaches a unit on the importance of wetland ecosystems. Her students learn about the energy available in these ecosystems, their role in our everyday life, and why we need to preserve them. The class creates a "living machine:" a mini biosphere stocked with plants, fish, and microorganisms. Students develop hypotheses about the wetland's ability to purify water, and test their theories by "contaminating" it with red soda and collecting data on temperature and oxygen levels.

To link the experiment to the local watershed, students research how everyday actions--like fertilizing the lawn--affect the nearby Huron River. As a final project, students work with the local watershed council to clean neighborhood storm drains, place "Dump No Waste" labels on them, and distribute educational leaflets to area residents.

"Students seem to take the energy available to them for granted," says Voght. "Most aren't aware of the hidden costs of our lifestyle. That's why this unit culminates with activities that empower them to make contributions to their community."