Summer 2005

Education for sustainability

Caretakers for tomorrow land

Helping young children develop a sense of place, personal accountability, social responsibility and an understanding of the links that exist between them can be an adventure. Kathryn Netherwood and Laura Stocker show how one school in Western Australia embeds sustainable values education into its projects.

An appreciation of the relationships between self, place and community; the diversity and uniqueness of land; and the need for sustainability are core values in the early 21st century. Education for sustainability has a political mandate at all levels of government through the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), the Department of Education Science and Training (DEST) Values Education Project and through the Sustainable Schools process in Western Australia.

The Lance Holt School, in the West End of Fremantle, was established in 1970 to provide innovative education with a community philosophy for primary aged students. Social justice, community participation, environmental awareness and best practice child-centred teaching have been the focus of the school throughout its thirty-five year history.

Values education

Values are embedded in our whole school approach to educating our students and the school has an explicit set of core values. Members of the school community largely subscribe to these values, and indeed they are at least part of why most parents choose to send their children to our school. These values are discussed and reinforced in an age appropriate way in classes. School Council decision-making is also informed by these values.

Values education at Lance Holt School is seen as the process of deeply engaging with what it means to be a human in relationship with other humans and with the world around us. It means recognising the links between rights and responsibilities. It means building links among abstract values, actions within the broader community, daily practice within the school, the educative process within the school, and the substantive content of our curriculum.

For us, values education means critically analysing the values underlying texts and media of all kinds. It means having open-ended discussions with students about values and behaviour. It means that, whilst accepting that diverse values exist within any community and that diversity is a good thing, teachers will actively challenge, for example, ideas or behaviours that are rooted in values of violence, exploitation, racism or sexism. Values education means being aware that education deals with facts in a world of values; not just values in a world of facts.

Sustainability education

At Lance Holt School, sustainability education broadens and deepens our existing process of values education. We have undertaken projects (funded by DEST) in practical and significant ways in order to explore sustainability values in the school. We aim to bring the concepts and practices of sustainability explicitly into the curriculum of our school and into our daily practice wherever possible. We assume that sustainability education should be appropriate to children’s age, responsive to children’s needs, not overly didactic, and enjoyable.

Importantly, sustainability education is not seen as an add-on to complete, then put aside while we get on with the rest of the real curriculum. Rather, sustainability education is becoming fully integrated into our school term and fully connected with the rest of the learning process.

Sustainability education should at least in part be undertaken in a practical outdoors context. Children learn and grow best while doing. Below we outline three case studies of recent projects that are leading to the integration of sustainability education into the Lance Holt School curriculum.

Coastcare

In 2002, we established ourselves as a Coastcare group responsible for the monitoring and care of Bathers Beach/Manjaree, a ten-minute walk from the school. The year 2–3s explored what it means to build attachment and to care for this place, and to develop the values and actions necessary for this. We saw sense of place and stewardship as very important age-appropriate ways of approaching sustainability for years 1–3.

Coastcare at Bathers Beach/ Manjaree is an ongoing commitment for the whole school. We created partnerships with Fremantle City Council, an Indigenous Elder, and the regional Coastcare program. It has involved, among other things, learning about the ecology, developing a range of art projects, learning about the Indigenous and other cultures and histories by listening to stories from community members, planting trees, and collecting litter from the beach.

Sustainable living conference

Sustainable Living, at Murdoch University’s Environmental Technology Centre (ETC), was the focus of the year 6–7 activities. Here, the upper school learnt the basics of permaculture gardening, solar cooking, environmentally friendly technology and cultural exchange. They explored sustainability values and the environmental ethics underlying these practices in workshops with members of Murdoch University’s academic staff from the Division of Environmental Science, the Kulbardi Aboriginal Centre, and the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy. The children then organised a conference to present their findings and invited parents, grandparents and the school community. The children found this to be a very empowering and deep learning process. The class teacher has continued with investigations of ecological footprints and climate-sensitive building design.

Mapping sustainability values

Our current mapping project (part of the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project) builds on the above projects and on a subsequent in-school DVD titled Kids Guide to Freo. In this mapping project, we are linking with schools across a wide socio-cultural and geographic range to share experiences among schools and their communities of how we sustain, share, and connect to our places. Our cluster comprises five small independent community schools in Western Australia, three metropolitan schools (Moerlina, Lance Holt and Kerry Street), one at Margaret River (Nyindamurra) and one remote Indigenous school located in the Pilbarra (Strelley). We are developing a series of sustainability values maps showing the areas we share and care for, and will share these maps and ideas among the cluster of schools.

Our students will use conventional and digital media to develop maps of their places showing sustainable features of cultural, social, economic and ecological values. The children will identify the sustainability values primarily from their own experience. Additional depth will be gained through the children’s collecting oral history and interviews with relevant people such as elders, Indigenous people, public library staff, fishing families, environmental managers, shop-keepers and artists. The maps will be supported by age-appropriate stories.

Maps can then be transferred to computer and assembled using the image mapping capability within standard web page software. Such digital technologies will also allow students to link additional features such as artworks, photographs, video recordings, oral histories and sound installations into the maps.

Our schools are focusing on the values of care and stewardship of the local environment, social and ecological responsibility, respect for the diverse traditions and cultures of others, and the value of sharing experiences of place with others. This mapping process provides opportunities for students to exercise ethical judgement and social responsibility about how their place is managed.

These three projects illustrate the many rich and diverse ways schools can engage their students, staff and communities in thoughtful and practical sustainable values education.

Kathryn Netherwood is cluster coordinator at Lance Holt School, Fremantle.

Laura Stocker is a senior lecturer in sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au