Understanding the Local Environment

Experiencing and observing the local environment is an essential part of environmental education. Understanding their surroundings helps learners build a strong foundation of skills and knowledge for reaching out further into the world and deeper into the conceptual understandings that environmental literacy demands. Direct experience in the environment also helps foster the awareness and appreciation that motivate learners to further questioning, better understanding, and appropriate concern and action.

Grades K-4

• Identify basic types of habitats Create a short list of plants and animals found in each.
• Trace the source of their drinking water and where it goes after it is used.
• Recognize resident animal species, migrants, and those that pass through on migratory routes.
• Describe aspects of the environment that change on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
• Identify sources of electricity used in the community (e.g., hydroelectric, fossil fuels, solar, nuclear).

Grades 5-8

• Classify local ecosystems and create food webs to show the interaction of specific plant and animal species.
• Describe how drinking water and wastewater are treated.
• Monitor changes in water or air quality, or other aspects of the local environment.
• Identify species that are locally threatened, endangered, or declining in population. Describe their habitat needs.
• Create a map for the local area that shows where food that is consumed locally comes from.

Grades 9-12

• Describe concepts such as succession, competition, predator/prey relationships, and parasitism.
• Evaluate sources of nonpoint source pollution of local bodies of water, including sources that are not local.
• Investigate short- and long-term environmental changes in a local watershed, or in air quality.
• Document changes in land use and their environmental effects.
• Trace human population trends for their region and make projections, based on research findings, for the future.

Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12)

The Guidelines for Learning are organized into four strands, each which represents a broad aspect of environmental education and its goal of environmental literacy. Within each strand, guidelines are suggested for three grade levels - fourth, eighth, and twelfth. Each guideline focuses on one element of environmental literacy, describing a level of skill or knowledge appropriate to the particular grade level.

Strand 1 — Questioning and Analysis Skills

A) Questioning
B) Designing investigations
C) Collecting information
D) Evaluating accuracy and reliability
E) Organizing information
F) Working with models and simulations
G) Developing proposed explanations

Strand 2 — Knowledge of Environmental Processes and Systems

Strand 2.1 — The Earth as a Physical System
A) Process that shape the Earth
B) Changes in Matter
C) Energy

Strand 2.2 — The Living Environment
A) Organisms, populations, and communities
B) Heredity and evolution
C) Systems and connections
D) The flow of matter and energy

Strand 2.3 — Humans and Their Societies
A) Individuals and groups
B) Culture
C) Political and economic systems
D) Global connections
E) Change and conflict

Strand 2.4 — Environment and Society
A) Human/environment interactions
B) Places
C) Resources
D) Technology
E) Environmental issues

Strand 3 — Skills for Understanding and Addressing Environmental Issues

Strand 3.1 — Skills for Analyzing and Investigating Environmental Issues
A) Identifying and investigating issues
B) Sorting out the consequences of issues
C) Identifying and evaluating alternative solutions and courses of action
D) Working with flexibility, creativity, and openness

Strand 3.2 — Decision-Making and Citizenship Skills
A) Forming and evaluating personal views
B) Evaluating the need for citizen action
C) Planning and taking action
D) Evaluating the results of actions

Strand 4 — Personal and Civic Responsibility

A) Understanding societal values and principles
B) Recognizing citizens' rights and responsibilities
C) Recognizing efficacy
D) Accepting personal responsibility

Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12) was published by the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE). Guidelines for Learning was developed with input of literally thousands of teachers, school administrators, environmental educators, scientists, and parents, as well as from a variety of professional organizations and government agencies. The Project has been funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through the Environmental Education and Training Partnership.

Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12)

Guidelines for Learning provides students, parents, educators, home schoolers, administrators, policy makers, and the public a set of common, voluntary guidelines for environmental education. The guidelines support state and local environmental education efforts by:

• Setting expectations for performance and achievement in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades;
• Suggesting a framework for effective and comprehensive environmental education programs and curricula;
• Demonstrating how environmental education can be used to meet standards set by the traditional disciplines and to give students opportunities to synthesize knowledge and experience across disciplines; and
• Defining the aims of environmental education.

These guidelines set a standard for high-quality EE in schools and other learning settings across the country, based on what an environmentally literate person should know and be able to do.

Essential Underpinnings of EE

• Systems—help make sense of a large and complex world. A system is made up of parts that can be understood separately. The whole is understood by understanding the relationships among the parts.

• Interdependence—Human well being is inextricably bound with environmental quality. Humans are a part of the natural order. We and the systems we create—our societies, political systems, economies, religions, cultures, technologies—impact the total environment. Since we are a part of nature rather than outside it, we are challenged to recognize the ramifications of our interdependence.

• The importance of where one lives—Beginning close to home, learners forge connections with, explore, and understand their immediate surroundings. The sensitivity, knowledge, and skills needed for this local connection provide a base for moving out into larger systems, broader issues, and an expanding understanding of causes, connections, and consequences.

• Integration and infusion—Disciplines from the natural sciences to the social sciences to the humanities are connected through the medium of the environment and environmental issues.

• Roots in the real world—Learners develop knowledge and skills through direct experience with the environment, environmental issues, and society. Investigation, analysis, and problem solving are essential activities and are most effective when relevant to the real world.

• Lifelong learning—Critical and creative thinking, decision making, and communication, as well as collaborative learning, are emphasized.

In the fifth through eighth grades, learners develop greater skills in abstract and creative thinking—and along with these, the ability to understand the interplay of environmental and human systems in greater depth. Environmental education can foster this development by focusing on investigation of local environmental systems, problems, and issues. As learners become actively engaged in deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, educators can use environmental problems to help learners explore their own responsibilities and ethics.

The kindergarten through fourth grade years are a time of tremendous cognitive development. By third and fourth grades, learners have developed some basic skills that help them construct knowledge. In these early years of formal education, learners tend to be concrete thinkers with a natural curiosity about the world around them. Environmental education can build on these characteristics by focusing on observation and exploration of the environment—beginning close to home.

By the end of twelfth grade, learners are well on their way to environmental literacy. They should possess the basic skills and dispositions they need to understand and act on environmental problems and issues as responsible citizens—and to continue the learning process throughout their lives. In the ninth through twelfth grades, environmental education can promote active and responsible citizenship by challenging learners to hone and apply problem-solving, analysis, persuasive communication, and other higher level skills—often in real-world contexts.

Finding Urban Nature

From: Changing What We Do, NAAEE, Rock Spring, Georgia.

What’s better than having fun volunteers leading outdoor activities with your students? Having FUN volunteers!

Finding Urban Nature (FUN) is one of the VINE (Volunteer-Led Investigations in Neighborhood Ecology) programs found in cities across the country. On designated days, specially trained volunteers go to schools to facilitate student investigations on the school grounds. Teams of educators involved in FUN have developed pre and post classroom studies to enhance FUN visits.

One Seattle teacher tied his FUN visits to a year-long unit on habitats. The unit began when the teacher placed a cracked aquarium in front of his third grade students and asked what they wanted to do with it. Before long, the aquarium became a four-star worm hotel!

The teacher asked what the worms would need to live in their habitat. The discussion triggered as many questions as answers: What do worms eat? Why do they come out when it rains? Are they really more active at night? The questions were recorded in a concept map that laid the foundation for many future investigations.

Prepared by schoolyard observations and research, the students built their worm hotel. Anxiously, they designed experiments to find answers to all their questions. Carefully, they poured water into one corner to study how worms react to rain. The students blocked light from one side of the aquarium to see if they could learn why worms come out at night. Hand lenses, microscopes and soil guides became routine tools as the third graders enthusiastically explored every change.

Volunteer seedlings sprouted, launching more investigations on plants and roots. Students discovered that worms and plants were interconnected, an essential part of understanding habitats.

The FUN volunteers were delighted to extend these classroom investigations outdoors. Out there, the students measured environmental factors that affect worms and discovered different numbers of worms living in different schoolyard habitats.