Outline the goals and specific characteristics of a green learning community.
How would you know one if you saw one?
Obviously, a green learning community would embrace living a greener lifestyle, but what else makes these communities different than how most of us are living today? A green community would try to embrace characteristics such as those laid out in the 10 Key Values essay, which include social and economical justice/equality, non violence, decentralization, and personal and global responsibility, to name a few. They would also probably emphasize that humans are a part of nature.
One of the main goals of such a community would be for its members to achieve ecological literacy. What this means is that instead of just looking at things as they are, there needs to be an over arching question of 'what then?' What's going to happen after that? In a green community, this will have been achieved, but in society right now, as seen in David Orr's "Ecological Literacy" we just aren't there as a whole. Orr thinks that we do not think broadly enough, we see education as a purely indoor activity, and that we lack aesthetic appreciation. So wow that's a bunch of words that don't really mean anything to me. What I think he is trying to say is that we think too one dimensionally We need to get over ourselves and start considering all of the parts not just the whole.
Some of the ways I think a green community would be easy to spot is in its lack of a societal hierarchy and its use of a consensus decision making process. These two features combine many of the other values and are easily recognized from the outside looking in as something radically different. Also, of course, there would be an emphasis on all of the other green values and sustainability. Everyone would be encouraged to express their opinions. I wonder how many of these characteristics the Green Quad here expresses.
As an educator myself, I was not taught to teach in this way. As I now adopt these values/processes into my class rooms, it is odd to see some "push back" from other teachers who feel that they may loose a certain sense of 'power' should they adopt some of these values. However, research has shown that as students take ownership of their learning, are more involved in curriculum decisions they remain more engaged.
ReplyDeleteI think our class is a good example of this. Unlike in other classes, I don't find myself memorizing a bunch of facts out of context for the purpose of passing a test. I feel like I'm actually LEARNING things that apply to my life outside of the school environment, which, to me, seems like a more practical way to learn.
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