Alan R. Berkowitz
October 6, 1999
- List of Key Recommendations
Overarching recommendation:
Recommendation 1. Advance urban ecosystem education by fostering broad public understanding that cities are ecosystems.
Recommendations concerning the practice of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 2. Incorporate urban ecosystems into the education agenda.
Recommendation 3. Develop an educational model that utilizes a collaborative process for participatory research, community discovery and action in urban ecosystems.
Recommendation 4. Promote continued work between educators, natural and social scientists on urban ecosystem education.
Recommendations concerning the conceptual foundations of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 5. Consider age appropriateness, development and pedagogy in advancing the practice of urban ecosystem education.
Recommendation 6. Clearly define the concepts and ways of knowing involved in understanding urban ecosystems.
Recommendation 7. Base the practice of urban ecosystem education on a critical analysis of the broader social framework within which we operate.
- Recommendations with Brief Explanations.
Overarching recommendation:
Recommendation 1. Advance urban ecosystem education by fostering broad public understanding that cities are ecosystems.
Urban ecosystem education should involve school-based and non school-based programs, media outreach and public participation to reach adults along with young people. One of the ultimate purposes of urban ecosystem education is to improve urban communities. This effort should include natural and social sciences, humanities and the arts. The most basic message to stress is: cities are ecosystems.
Recommendations concerning the practice of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 2. Incorporate urban ecosystems into the education agenda.
School administrations should adopt learning outcomes and curricula that emphasize urban ecosystems. Likewise, we must provide teachers with new curricula and support to focus their instruction on important ideas in understanding urban ecosystems (e.g., mass balance of a school, a neighborhood, a metropolis).
Recommendation 3. Develop an educational model that utilizes a collaborative process for participatory research, community discovery and action in urban ecosystems.
A participatory, community-based approach to learning about and taking actions to improve urban ecosystems is a promising educational tool in need of development, analysis and refinement, and implementation. Such an approach will teach environmental civics and democracy through practice, empower students to use science to understand, organize and improve their community, and contribute to the development of systems thinking.
Recommendation 4. Promote continued work between educators, natural and social scientists on urban ecosystem education.
To understand urban ecosystems, we need concepts and ways of knowing from natural, physical and social sciences, and the humanities. Curriculum integration and innovative instruction are required, accepting a commitment to depth over breadth and the need to provide interdisciplinary and integrated training to future teachers, citizens, professionals and students. We must champion new partnerships between scientists, educators, students and citizens in developing collaborations where research, education and stewardship go hand-in-hand.
Recommendations concerning the conceptual foundations of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 5. Consider age appropriateness, development and pedagogy in advancing the practice of urban ecosystem education.
We need to provide learners with a variety of ways to be successful in building their understanding of urban ecosystems, where all learn as they learn best and are challenged to stretch and grow in new ways, too. Our work must be grounded in the insights into pedagogy, learners, and educators from the fields of educational and cognitive psychology, sociology and anthropology. We must motivate people to create a sense of place within the urban environment and to support that sense of place with connections through learning, activity, and participation in the local community.
Recommendation 6. Clearly define the concepts and ways of knowing involved in understanding urban ecosystems.
Social science insights must be thoroughly integrated with the traditional ecosystem perspective to build an understanding that embraces the biota, the physical environment, ecological interactions, controls, and boundaries, along with humans and their institutions, the built environment, information and behaviors, social structure, money and power hierarchies.
Recommendation 7. Base the practice of urban ecosystem education on a critical analysis of the broader social framework within which we operate.
While cities contribute to the wealth and well-being of the countryside, in material ecological terms, cities are largely parasitic on nature. The consumer habits of (particularly wealthy-country) urbanites both drain the increasingly global hinterlands of their resources and pollute the global commons, including the immediate urban environment, with the poor and cultural minorities both within and outside of cities suffering the worst consequences. Urban ecosystem education must elaborate a new vision of cities as positive physical and social environments for people and that contribute to the overall integrity of the ecosystems that sustain them and of the ecosphere as a whole.
- Recommendations and Reflections
Overarching recommendation:
Recommendation 1. Advance urban ecosystem education by fostering broad public understanding that cities are ecosystems.
Urban ecosystem education should involve school-based and non school-based programs, media outreach and public participation to reach adults along with young people. One of the ultimate purposes of urban ecosystem education is to improve urban communities. This effort should include natural and social sciences, humanities and the arts. The most basic message to stress is: cities are ecosystems.
Specific recommendations for promoting broad understanding that cities are ecosystems include:
A. Produce and disseminate a pamphlet for teachers with practical applications of the papers in the Conference book, including teaching methods, content and processes.
B. Form a diverse and inclusive network of individuals, programs and organizations interested in promoting an understanding of cities as ecosystems.
C. Carry out extensive public information efforts building on the products and recommendations of the Cary Conference.
Recommendations concerning the practice of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 2. Incorporate urban ecosystems into the education agenda.
School administrations should adopt learning outcomes and curricula that emphasize urban ecosystems. Likewise, we must provide teachers with new curricula and support to focus their instruction on important ideas in understanding urban ecosystems (e.g., mass balance of a school, a neighborhood, a metropolis). This two-ended approach is needed to fully incorporate urban ecosystems into the formal education agenda.
To achieve this goal, we propose:
A. Creating a collection of resource materials about urban ecosystem education. All materials would be expected to demonstrate what key understandings were developed and how. Material could be solicited via a print and electronic "call for success stories", with instructions to describe the resource, referring to descriptive materials available elsewhere, and to identify what principle(s) are illustrated. The resource collection could take the form of a print- and/or web-based list or a stand-along publication, and could include:
1. Case studies of successful urban ecosystem education programs, with web site addresses, etc., for getting more information.
2. Success stories of urban ecosystem teaching in classrooms.
3. Techniques for teaching specific concepts in the biological, social, or physical sciences, or in economics.
4. An annotated bibliography of books, articles, and other print and visual materials pertinent to urban ecosystem education.
B. A primer on urban ecosystems, with decision- makers and urban dwellers as the target audience. The primer should be readable ("Urban Ecosystems for Everyone") yet authoritative. A comparative approach among cities and between cities and other ecosystems might be most effective. People who will be interested in such a publication include: a) decision makers, b) educators (though it won't be a text), and c) urban dwellers.
C. A collection of conceptual frameworks or even curriculum modules (including student activities, etc.) to be used primarily by educators in formal and non-formal settings, with the ultimate goal of stimulating environmental awareness and fostering environmental citizenship. The modules might be 1-2 weeks long so that they can be inserted as a unit into existing curriculum, or to be integrated into a year long environmental science curriculum. Such modules would help address the problem that urban ecosystems are given "second-class" status to rainforest and coral reef ecosystems, for example, and also might encourage authors of ecology textbooks at the high school and college levels to include more examples from urban ecosystem in their texts. Concrete curricula such as these might also help with integrating urban ecosystems into the pre- and in-service training of teachers. These, as in any new curricula 1) shouldn't be isolated from other components of the curriculum, 2) should be designed for math, geography, civics, and social science classes as well as for science classes, and 3) should recognize the need for teachers to receive professional development and support as they integrate urban ecosystems into their curriculum.
Recommendation 3. Develop an educational model that utilizes a collaborative process for participatory research, community discovery and action in urban ecosystems.
A participatory, community-based approach to learning about and taking actions to improve urban ecosystems is a promising educational tool in need of development, analysis and refinement, and implementation. Such an approach will teach environmental civics and democracy through practice, empower students to use science to understand, organize and improve their community, and contribute to the development of systems thinking. We recommend that model curricula for participatory, community-based action research be developed, based on well-articulated learning goals and assessment outcomes. Such a model might include these stages:
1. Multi-way information sharing among students, educators, community members, scientists, policy makers, etc. All expertise available is used, including local and "outside" experts, resulting in the identification of what we do and don't know.
2. Identification of issues. Discover what community members like and dislike, what they'd change, what problems are in the neighborhood, etc, resulting in the selection of the issues to address through consensus, clusters, prioritization and/or voting.
3. What do we need to know? What do we already know? Look at the historical and scientific context of the issue, and what skills are needed to address it (technology, experiments, surveys, interviews, statistics).
4. Where and how to get the information? What resources do we already have and how do we get what we don't have? The group is organized and resources allocated.
5. Collect the data.
6. Interpret the data. What does it tell us? Several cycles of reporting and evaluation occur.
7. Develop plan for action, identifying stakeholder perspectives, conducting force field analysis (Kurt Lewin), etc.
8. Implement action plan.
9. Evaluation and reflection, by individuals and the group.
10. Refine, revise, or end.
Recommendation 4. Promote continued work between educators, natural and social scientists on urban ecosystem education.
To understand urban ecosystems, we need concepts and ways of knowing from natural, physical and social sciences, and the humanities. Curriculum integration and innovative instruction are required, accepting a commitment to depth over breadth and the need to provide interdisciplinary and integrated training to future teachers, citizens, professionals and students. We must champion new partnerships between scientists, educators, students and citizens in developing collaborations where research, education and stewardship go hand-in-hand. Specific recommendations to accomplish this include:
A. Support and encourage scientists who work in cities to involve students and teachers in their research. One mechanism might be to develop training grants (e.g., from NSF) for scientists to work with teachers.
B. Encourage federations of organizations to promote urban ecosystem education in and out of schools.
C. Foster international cooperation for urban ecosystem education, including interchange textbooks and other teaching tools.
D. Conduct research on ways to integrate different disciplines through systems thinking for understanding urban ecosystem (e.g., NSF proposal). This research also should assess student learning via urban ecosystem case studies versus through more traditional techniques.
E. Develop explicit training programs for students in collaboration and cooperation.
In developing such initiatives, a number of issues arise that must be addressed:
o Fostering interdisciplinary training is challenging, especially within higher education institutions as they are now structured. Reward structures and barriers in higher education against virtually any form of faculty training or re-training are significant and systemic impediments to change.
o We are just beginning to understand systems thinking and what might be effective strategies for promoting it.
o Fostering and sustaining change requires different strategies in primary vs. secondary school, with their different time and space scales. We also must consider a diversity of dissemination models - teacher-to-teacher or school-to-school - must be considered.
o The current focus on reading and math in formal education may constrain adoption of an urban ecosystem emphasis. Likewise, there may be even more resistance to incorporating social science into the K-12 curriculum than for incorporating environmental science themes.
Recommendations concerning the conceptual foundations of urban ecosystem education:
Recommendation 5. Consider age appropriateness, development and pedagogy in advancing the practice of urban ecosystem education.
We need to provide learners with a variety of ways to be successful in building their understanding of urban ecosystems, where all learn as they learn best and are challenged to stretch and grow in new ways, too. Our work must be grounded in the insights into pedagogy, learners, and educators from the fields of educational and cognitive psychology, sociology and anthropology. We must motivate people to create a sense of place within the urban environment and to support that sense of place with connections through learning, activity, and participation in the local community. To achieve this vision, we recommend:
A. Completion of a thorough literature review and work with existing networks to reveal insights into pedagogy, learners, and educators to support the development of urban ecosystem education. This review should synthesize research on teaching and learning as it pertains to the processes and substance of urban ecosystem education. A wealth of knowledge already exists from research and practice on these topics. This effort could vault the urban ecosystem education effort ahead on many fronts and help avoid pitfalls experienced by previous educational programs.
B. Urban ecosystems courses should be taught by multidisciplinary teams. These teams of educators need solid underpinnings of content knowledge in their chosen disciplines and they should use pedagogical strategies that recognize different learning styles and that can guide student construction of knowledge.
C. Emphasize experiences that engage or motivate children to create a sense of place within the urban environment and to support that sense of place with a connection to an activity, organization or individual in the community.
Several concerns must be addressed. For example, how early can you pass on to learners the "ecosystem" concept? Can we assume that each discipline is taught the same way, or are there some similarities and many differences? How do vocabulary and pedagogy differ for each of the disciplines involved in understanding urban ecosystems, and what are the implications of such differences for the ways we impart in learners appropriate tools for decision making, building a world view, ways of knowing and questioning, etc.? If it is indeed true that the more senses that get involved, the deeper the learning is, what does this means for our teaching about cities?
Recommendation 6. Clearly define the concepts and ways of knowing involved in understanding urban ecosystems.
Social science insights must be thoroughly integrated with the traditional ecosystem perspective to build an understanding that embraces the biota, the physical environment, ecological interactions, controls, and boundaries, along with humans and their institutions, the built environment, information and behaviors, social structure, money and power hierarchies. We need a clear, integrated concept of the urban ecosystem, and propose the diagram below for this purpose. The essential features are: biota-abiota-interactions-controls-boundaries, with the next layer being humans, human institutions, the built environment, information and behaviors as new components that need to be incorporated in some fashion into the original ecosystem conceptualization.
Conceptual and practical issues that must be addressed include:
o Ecology in cities is not the same as the ecology of cities. We must be clear whether we are considering the entire metropolis, or any representative portion thereof, to be an ecosystem, or simply the more familiar looking ecosystems within cities such as remnant forest stands, abandoned fields, etc.
o Urban ecosystems and human-dominated ecosystems are not synonymous. Rural ecosystems are humanized or human-dominated as well. However, cities may be seen as nodes of especial human influence, where humans are a keystone species.
o The ecosystem concept may need to be redefined to accommodate systems where humans are present and/or dominant. While energy and mass balance concepts are the same in any ecosystem, with the need to consider social structure, money and power hierarchies, and cultural structures, the traditional ecosystem concept seems inadequate. Likewise, as social scientists add elements from traditional ecology pertaining to the human component (e.g., population and community ecology of humans) the ecosystem model becomes further amplified or modified.
o "Ecosystem" may be an inclusive or "meta"-model. However, the implication some draw from this that social sciences are under ecosystem science might reveal the biases of ecologists. Why should the big circle in the diagram be called the ecosystem and not simply the system?
o Consideration of the kinds of questions being addressed might help identify the unique and distinct attributes of studying urban ecosystems using an ecosystem approach. For example, a garden in a schoolyard might be considered an ecosystem. Its effects on microclimate could be studied, and most agree that this would be an ecosystem study. Its effects on people's state of mind could be studied, and there is less agreement that this would be an ecosystem study. As another example, consider a reservoir in Israel used for irrigation. Studies of the reservoir's impacts on local microclimate are clearly ecosystem in nature. However, studies of the best use of the reservoir, where the decision-making process involving ecology, social science, economics, etc. are brought to bear, is not as clearly an application of an ecosystem approach. Some proposed to restrict use of the term, "ecosystem approach," to those cases (in cities or elsewhere) that address questions of flux, biota, abiotic factors, transformation, interaction and/or control. The omission, under this definition, of linkages between the environment and human behavior is problematic to others.
o Meteorological models are now part of the toolbox and models of ecology, whereas they were not just 20 years ago. Why can't we now, in similar fashion, incorporate social science explanations into the ecological system scientist's toolbox?
Recommendation 7. Base the practice of urban ecosystem education on a critical analysis of the broader social framework within which we operate.
While cities contribute to the wealth and well-being of the countryside, in material ecological terms, cities are largely parasitic on nature. The consumer habits of (particularly wealthy-country) urbanites both drain the increasingly global hinterlands of their resources and pollute the global commons, including the immediate urban environment, with the poor and cultural minorities both within and outside of cities suffering the worst consequences. Urban ecosystem education must elaborate a new vision of cities as positive physical and social environments for people and that contribute to the overall integrity of the ecosystems that sustain them and of the ecosphere as a whole. The discussion group addressing this issue shared the following thoughts:
"Is development of sustainable urban ecosystems even theoretically achievable from within the prevailing paradigm?" By "prevailing paradigm" we meant the current global development/integration model which is based on sustainability through material growth (or at least real income growth) and enhanced economic and resource efficiency. At its core are assumptions that human well-being is most closely associated with material consumption at all income levels, that the worth of non-human species and systems is measurable chiefly in terms of their instrumental or use value to humans, that technology can substitute for the goods and services of nature, and that ecosystems and the ecosphere are predictable and controllable by humans. Even if this paradigm is indeed, destructively unsustainable, there would nevertheless be great resistance to any deviation from it by those who most directly benefit from the current world order. Wealth and power insulates its wielders from the negative consequences of their own values and behavior.
Recognizing that this assessment is bleak and debilitating and that if people are to support policies and life-style changes toward sustainability, we have to create a positive vision that would be more attractive to most people than the alternatives (including the status quo). Voluntary change cannot be based on sacrifice. If people are asked to give something up (such as free use of private cars in cities), they have to have a sense that it will be worth it, that they will be better off for the change. This alternative vision must be inspiring in ways that capture the popular imagination if it is to acquire any political momentum and show up in actual policy (e.g., in the form of ecological fiscal reform, carbon taxes, etc.).
We recommend advancing the practice of urban ecosystem education in such a way that it develops a vision of cities as positive physical and social environments for people and as contributing to the overall integrity of the ecosystems that sustain them and of the ecosphere as a whole. Cities (or at least urban regions) are increasingly the primary immediate habitat of humanity, and yet we scarcely understand that in a material sense, they are dependent on the hinterland for their sustenance. Certainly cities also contribute to the wealth and well-being of the countryside, but the point stands that in material ecological terms, cities are largely parasitic on nature. By consequence, the consumer habits of (particularly wealthy-country) urbanites both drain the increasingly global hinterlands of their resources and pollute the global commons, including the immediate urban environment. Of course it is the poor and cultural minorities both within and outside of cities who suffer the worst effects of the consumption/production patterns that prevail in industrial capitalist societies. Urban ecosystem education efforts that elaborate this new vision must: a) clearly identify the goals and objectives, b) provide vivid images of what alternative scenarios looks like in action, c) specify the requisite teaching and learning methods, and d) emphasize the importance of involvement of all parts of the community - formal and non-formal education, the media, higher education and teacher preparation, etc.
As we pursue this vision, we must wrestle with several vexing questions: How can the concept of "city" be redefined in ways that create a more equal, mutualistic relationship between cities per se and their hinterlands? In other words, how can we more fully integrate cities into the other sub-systems that comprise the whole human ecosystem (cities in themselves are not the human ecosystem)? What is the role of natural ecosystems in cities? How can the wealth created by the economic activity in cities be more equitably distributed so that the immediate social and physical environments for people living in cities is healthy, nurturing, and aesthetically satisfying for all? What is the role of environmental education in general and urban ecosystem studies in particular in creating the level of popular understanding of the mix of socio-economic and ecological issues required for positive policy changes toward sustainable cities (and ultimately, sustainable societies)?