Summer 2005

Education for sustainability

Quality outcomes for sustainable schools

A ten-step plan is the key to the Sustainable Schools in Victoria program. Annette Gough reveals how six Victorian schools are benefiting from their involvement.

Sustainable Schools in Victoria (SSiV) is an initiative of the Gould League and the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies (CERES). It is designed to provide an holistic education program for schools which is essentially a framework or guided process for facilitating cultural and behavioural change towards sustainability in schools.

The Sustainable Schools program integrates changes to the practical operations of the school with sustainability issues in the curriculum and helps to build links to local communities. Central to the process is the Ten-Step plan designed as an action research process to ensure commitment to and ownership of the initiative by the whole school community. This plan is followed through the implementation of the core module and each of the four resource modules. When schools have completed a module and achieved their goals and targets, they apply for accreditation. This process is summarised in the table below.

Sustainable Schools embody a different vision of education and administration of schools. The process has a focus on promoting cultural change across the whole school community by providing teachers with a framework for the whole school community to effectively introduce and maintain a sustainability program in a school.

Taking up the challenge

Environmental educators see environmental education as having a role in promoting educational change. However, until recently, few environmental education initiatives in Australia went beyond just focusing on changing the curriculum content to incorporate environmental education to actually taking up the challenge of changing the whole educational process.

Education for sustainable development (ESD), or education for sustainability, has a broader focus than environmental education. It still has much in common with earlier conceptions of environmental education, including objectives encouraging critical thinking, values analysis and active citizenship in environmental contexts, but differs in that ESD emphasises education and capacity building more than environmental problem-solving.

The broader focus of ESD outlined in UNESCO Decade of Education for Sustainable Development documents is very much one of quality education: ‘The basic vision of the DESD is a world where everyone has the opportunity to benefit from education and learn the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future and for positive societal transformation.’ It is a vision like this that underpins the Sustainable Schools initiative, and the recent national statement on environmental education for schools, Educating for a Sustainable Future.

School achievements

Six Victorian schools—Antonio Park PS, Mildura West PS, Somers PS, Manorvale PS, Torquay PS, Williamstown HS (Bayside campus)—are all working towards a sustainable future through their school operations, curriculum and whole school involvement. Although initially focused on environmental outcomes, their involvement in Sustainable Schools has led to each school achieving economic, educational, environmental and social outcomes together with achievements such as:

• embedding Sustainable Schools in their school operations and curriculum across all learning areas
• engaging student learning
• involving students in working towards a sustainable future
• developing extensive links with their local (and often broader) communities
• high staff and student morale.

Economic outcomes for the schools include savings from reduced water and energy consumption and waste production and income from sales of eggs and vegetables. Educational outcomes include students being more actively engaged in their learning and with a richer curriculum, as well as community education outcomes. Social outcomes include: partnerships with the local community; increased student leadership, social responsibility and self-esteem; a sense of belonging and ownership; behaviour improvements; and decreases in student absences and vandalism. Environmental outcomes include enhanced biodiversity on the school site, extensive waste recycling and modelling good environmental practices for the school community.

Success factors

There are a number of common success factors for Sustainable Schools in the six schools:

• broad ownership of and engagement with Sustainable Schools across the school
• teachers, students and parents share the vision of the environment having a high profile in the school
• support of the school leadership team
• enthusiastic and committed staff
• immersion of all staff in the Core unit
• the structure of Sustainable Schools, which made it easy to implement
• the integration of sustainability into school operations and across the curriculum
• student involvement in day to day sustainability operations in the school
• funds to enable the development of visible sustainability infrastructure (such as rainwater tanks)
• a school grounds master plan that helps bring together all aspects of achieving a Sustainable School.

Limiting factors

Although the schools reported a large number of achievements, they were also realistic about the limiting factors for the successful implementation of Sustainable Schools. The perennial limiting factors of time and money were, of course, mentioned. As one principal said, schools need ‘More money to make things happen faster and more things happen (or happen at all)’.

Towards quality education

Sustainable Schools is very much about developing a new, transformative, approach to education, and, in particular, transforming educational practices and outcomes by addressing school operations, curriculum and whole school involvement as a package. The traditional model for implementing environmental education in schools is isolated individuals working to make the school more sustainable while the rest of the school is engaged in activities (curriculum and operations) that make it less sustainable. However, in the Sustainable Schools initiative, the whole school has a commitment to sustainability and the action research process that underpins the ten-step plan (through monitoring, reflecting and re-planning for continuous quality improvement) ensures that the whole school is working together to achieve a shift in culture of the school community, including curriculum and operations. Even where there is resistance to the Sustainable Schools initiative, this is mitigated by the ground swell of the cultural change in the school community.

These Sustainable Schools are also achieving in other aspects of quality learning. All of the schools commented on the benefits to student learning in terms of:

• positive attitude towards learning
• enhanced fundamental skills in literacy, numeracy and self-expression, which will enable them to be successful across all areas of learning
• developing high level personal, communication and social competencies to work independently and within groups
• experience in innovation, creativity and problem-solving
• acquiring confidence to deal with technological and cultural change
• building skill sets in the wider community and changing workplace
• improving ability to access information and reflect upon it.

The initiative also addressed new understandings about what it means to be a student, teacher or member of society. Teachers have developed new pedagogical skills and knowledge and strategies for working with the community. The whole school community has also developed new social patterns through working together, new social relationships, new opportunities and ownership and pride in the school— as well as adopting sustainability practices at home.

Towards a sustainable future

Sustainable Schools is not the total answer for achieving a sustainable future, but it is certainly a step in the right direction and one that is consistent with early visions which saw environmental education as making a powerful contribution to the renovation of the educational process.

The experiences of these six schools indicate that the Sustainable Schools program is a most appropriate strategy for renovating educational processes and achieving quality education. The Sustainable Schools strategy shifts the focus from the enthusiastic individual as the instigator of change to the more successfully sustainable commitment and ownership of the initiative by the whole school community. There is strength in numbers when it comes to achieving quality outcomes in sustainable schools.

References

Armstrong, P & Bottomley, E (2003). ‘Sustainable Schools Program – a one-stop shop for sustainability education’, paper presented at the annual conference of the North American Association for Environmental Education, Anchorage, Alaska, USA. www.gould.org.au/downloads/conferences/SusSchools_NAAEE_2003_Alaska.pdf

Gough, A (2004). Report of Evaluation of the Sustainable Schools Program Stormwater Action Project, Deakin University Faculty of Education Consultancy and Development Unit for the Gould League. www.gould.org.au/QBL_outcomes.htm

Annette Gough is professor and head of the School of Education at RMIT University in Victoria.

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