Environmental Restoration
Our natural environment has taken a particularly harsh beating over the past couple of centuries. Disruption, degradation, pollution, destruction, and depletion have all been visited upon the natural world in the name of civilization and progress. As a result, the productivity of our seas, our forests, our prairie lands, our lakes and streams has been seriously compromised. The United Nation’s 4-year study and report, The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, points to environmental restoration as one of the principal efforts we can undertake to recover the productivity of our natural heritage and the replenishment of our natural systems. Learn more…
Education Innovation
Place-based education is a relatively new approach that builds a relationship between students and where they live. It serves as a foundation for exploring and contributing to local landscapes and local culture. It demolishes the barrier between classroom and community by forging connections with groups and organizations sharing a common purpose. Meaningful service projects nurture curiosity and connections, as they build a sense of responsibility and initiative. You can learn more about the benefits of place-based education and service-learning.
Children and Nature
Children spend less and less time in nature exploring, wondering, playing, delighting, and just being. Increasingly, their time is spent indoors in front of one kind of electronic screen or another and being aspectator. Being excessively passive and sedentary has left our kids, among other things, overweight, diabetic, over-stimulated, devoid of initiative, anxious, and disconnected from nature and community(even family). There is a movement among parents, educators, health professionals and others that recognizes the importance of connecting kids with nature. And the importance of weaving active experienceswith nature into education. Learn more about benefits of involving children with nature.
Child Empowerment
Children are not miniature people waiting to be adults. It is so easy for we, their elders, to patronize and condescend when we feel we know their limits. But in truth, kids are much more competent and capable than most adults and schools given them credit for. Often, it is our own thoughts and preconceptions that limit them. They just need the proper venues, opportunities, and support to express their competencies in a way that allows them to make meaningful contributions. It is up to adults to provide those conditions so that a child’s potential can be explored and expressed. Challenging our children with real-world opportunities is how they come into their own and how they learn that they are valued members of the larger community. You can learn how educators who are pioneering this approach to education are implementing it.
Community Building through Restoration
Local environmental restoration projects can be an ideal way for different parts of a community to work together — schools, landowners, civic organizations and clubs, religious congregations, government agencies, businesses. It is amazing how a common purpose can motivate and unite groups of people who otherwise might not have much contact. It can even help them overcome differences and discord. In the matter of restoring natural functions to a landscape, recovering species, and providing important educational opportunities for children, people find they have more in common than not. You can learn how others have collaborated and assembled coalitions to undertake environmental restoration projects. (Web link)