Abstract
The once “looming” climate concern creeping its way into our world is no longer “knocking at the door.” It is in our house currently dominating our world, and it demands an immediate and powerful response. When equipped correctly, schools can effectively combat substantial problems such as this one. Long gone are the days when educators got by with school recycling programs and annual lessons for Earth Day. Education on climate change cannot be reduced to a single unit in science class, through the teaching of natural disasters in geography, or with the efforts of one or two environmentally conscious teachers. It orders invariant attention and should encourage action across all subject areas at all age levels. Yet, many educators are confined by the everyday challenges of our jobs and constraining curricula. So, where do we begin?
Overview
In Teaching Environmental Issues in Social Studies: Education for Civic Sustainability in the 21st Century, Bethany Vosburg-Bluem, Margaret Crocco, and Jeff Passe implore social studies educators to prioritize sustainability in their classrooms to combat our environmental crisis. They highlight a new framework known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), which is also commonly referred to as Educating for a Sustainable Future (EfSF), Sustainability Education (SE), and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Regardless of the name or corresponding acronym, the purpose of EfS is to “develop informed, active and critical citizens who are able to balance their rights to a clean, safe and fulfilling environment with their responsibilities to present and future generations and to other species” (p. 14).
As is known to many in the field of social studies, “the mission of social studies, then and now, has been citizenship education” (p.7). Citizenship education has primarily concerned social and economic sectors, yet the contributors in this text call to reframe this concept with the inclusion of environmental issues. Social, economic, and environmental issues are expected to be addressed in tandem to improve our world for ourselves and future generations. The authors argue that social studies’ emphasis on citizenship education uniquely situates the field to be a leader in centering Education for Sustainability. Through its “wide range of perspectives and support for those who are beginning to take an interest in the field [sustainability education]” and its growth across “a diverse array of stakeholders,” Education for Sustainability is thought to be both helpful and hopeful (p. 12).
Chapter Descriptions and Significance
Vosburg-Bluem, Crocco, and Passe’s book is organized by chapter with an additional foreword and introduction. Each of the fourteen chapters is unique and highlights the voices of different educators with expertise in different subjects and age levels, ranging from early childhood through secondary. There is a range of methodologies appropriate for each author/author team’s respective research with an emphasis on qualitative practitioner research. Despite their differences, the chapters are interconnected through their unwavering commitment to sustainability education.
Jenn Hooven, Mark Kissling, and Misty Woods offer great ideas on how to integrate EfS into an early-childhood setting through their “Earthen Curriculum” in Chapter Two, “Teaching Ecological Citizenship Through an Earthen Early-Childhood Curriculum.” At the Child Care Center on Penn State University’s campus, these educators use both emergent and planned earthen curriculum that allows students to recognize their membership in the “land-community,” which is a term they derive from Aldo Leopold describing community beyond humans “to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (p. 26). This idea is opposite to the persistent belief of anthropocentrism, an exclusionary lens that suggests humans are the most important beings on earth. Students at this Child Care Center, also known as “the Center,” interact with the land-community by going outside in all kinds of weather, composting, taking nature walks, gardening, playing in their mud kitchen, and learning from plants and animals, just to name a few. Hooven, Kissling, and Woods offer a plethora of ideas to allow students’ “affinity for nature to flourish” while simultaneously teaching them to become citizens of the land-community (p. 32). Their instructional strategies could be implemented in early childhood settings and beyond with age-appropriate modifications to provide a meaningful introduction to Education for Sustainability.
Other contributors such as Greer Burroughs, Amanda Ianucilli, and Morgan Johnston in Chapter Three along with Matthew S. Hollstein in Chapter Twelve suggest using literacy as a tool for EfS. Chapter Three, “Teaching Children to Speak for the Trees and All Creatures Big and Small,” speaks to different lessons where elementary educators used fiction and non-fiction literature as entry points to sustainability education. The Lorax by Dr. Suess, Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa by Jeanette Winter, City Green by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan, Tell Me, Tree by Gail Gibbons, and Who Will Plant a Tree? by Jerry Pallotta were all featured with corresponding innovative, well-planned lessons. These lessons could be modified to fit secondary students as well. Furthermore, Hollstein in Chapter Twelve, “Equal Rights, Unequal Risk: Citizenship in a Changing Environment,” suggests using Ishmael by Daniel Quinn as a tool for students to “re-examine the connections between human beings and the natural world” (p. 173). Hollstein uses this reading of Ishmael as an activity to discuss the issue of horizontal hydraulic fracturing (fracking). However, this reading activity could stand alone or be utilized when discussing other environmental issues.
The other contributors featured in this publication provide many other instructional strategies to incorporate EfS into social studies classrooms, most of which are rooted in Deweyan assumptions (p. 195). Ethan Lowenstein and John Lupinacci in Chapter Four, “Powerful Place-Based Social Studies: Learning With the Maps We Make,” connect students by “highlighting diverse cultures and environmental features” on maps, which are usually considered trivial to students (p. 72). Many of the lessons geared toward secondary social studies included inquiry strategies for different discipline areas such as world history, civics, geography, and economics. Chapter Nine, “Food Security and Sustainability,” and Chapter Ten, “The Politics of Water,” make arguments that water and food security should be included in sustainability education as opposed to focusing solely on issues like fossil-fuel emissions. Both Jeff Passe and Charles Sepulveda in Chapter Six and Li-Ching Ho in Chapter Fourteen recommend teaching through indigenous epistemologies and “alternative” paradigms like Engaged Buddhism, Confucianism, and Buen Vivir to encourage students to reframe their relationships with the environment. Many authors additionally encourage using current or recent events (ex. Dakota Access Pipeline) to increase relevancy. Regardless of age group or discipline, this book is successful in providing pertinent, engaging lessons on sustainability for any K-12 teacher to implement in their classroom.
Recommendation
Teaching Environmental Issues in Social Studies: Education for Civic Sustainability in the 21st Century serves as a great tool for any educator, especially social studies educators, looking to do more than teach one or two lessons on climate change. By teaching through a sustainability lens rather than teaching about environmental issues with no place for action, this book shifts how educators teach and how students think about our relationship with the environment.
Most notably, this book draws attention to the issue of anthropocentrism. Humans since the agricultural revolution have acted as “Takers,” using the earth and everything for our own consumption (Quinn, 1992). Previous years of scholarship in social studies education have not explicitly named this detrimental way of thinking. Yet, the authors and author teams in this book identify anthropocentrism as an issue and offer ways to combat it in the classroom.
Implementing Education for Sustainability into practice requires extra time and planning for the teacher, which may be difficult with already existing demands. Additionally, some of the topics covered may receive backlash from certain community members. All the lessons correspond with National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) standards, which can reinforce an educator if such backlash were to occur.
In Kimmerer’s (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass, she questions, “How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” (p. 6). The EfS framework outlined in this book helps us to feel that path. Students can take action and address more relevant issues, which lessens the fatalistic ideas that typically accompany lessons on climate change. Teachers can also feel like they are making a true difference in their classrooms. Teaching Environmental Issues in Social Studies: Education for Civic Sustainability in the 21st Century can offer hope and allow us to visualize a world of ecological and cultural sustainability. After all, the trifold of social, economic, and environmental issues all interacts and overlap. By addressing the environmental issues at hand, we may find solutions to social and economic issues as well. The question is: how do we get everyone on board?