Designing Environmental Education in North East India via a field-based collaborative approach

2020년 2월

서울대학교 대학원

협동과정 글로벌교육협력 전공

Leslie Elizabeth Sprong

India is a rapidly developing country, which results in a vast consumption of

natural resources. For India’s rapid development to be sustainable, its toll on the

environment and natural resource usage needs to be kept in check. One key factor

to support sustainable development and resource use is quality environmental

education. Environmental education has the potential to motivate and empower

people to change their behaviors and take action towards sustainable development.

However, teaching environmental education in a large and diverse country, such as

India, is complex. To be effective, environmental education needs to take in to

account the local context, both in terms of the natural environment and the culture.

Although India has made significant progress in this area by developing national

curriculum standards and educational policies to promote environmental education

in schools, educators, especially in rural areas, face the challenge of how to

adequately teach environmental education in K-12 school settings.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have the potential to play an

important role in providing in-service teacher training, curriculum materials, and

educational programs aimed to improve environmental education – especially in

rural areas. However, for NGO educational initiatives to be successful, it is

important for workers to have not only positive relationships with teachers and

communities, but also to have knowledge about social, cultural, and economic

issues that impact the local environment. The objective of this research was to

introduce a collaborative field-based model to help support a local NGO in

designing a context-specific approach to teaching environmental education that is

culturally relevant and appropriate for implementation in local school settings.

Understanding and responding to environmental issues requires that students be

able to understand how locally contextualized environmental, social, and economic

concerns are connected to global issues. In order to do this, students need to make

connections between their home life, school life, and the greater world.

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) works to better understand the

relationship between teachers and their students, where the cultural knowledge of

the students is used to help to make classroom learning more relevant and

meaningful. A culturally relevant pedagogical approach to developing and

implementing environmental education offers teachers and students a way to learn

about and address local environmental issues by drawing from real-life experiences

and knowledge and then learning how to apply this knowledge and experience to

affect positive changes in both the local and global contexts. Therefore,

environmental education programs that are designed based on culturally relevant

pedagogical approaches have the potential to be both transformative and

sustainable.

In an effort to apply this approach to environmental education curriculum

development in this study, the researcher, an environmental educator, implemented

a collaborative field-based approach that engaged NGO workers, and teachers from

several middle schools in the Chirang District of Assam, India to identify the

learning needs of the local students. In order to realize this, the environmental

educator collaborated with the NGO workers and teachers to first measure students’

knowledge, attitudes, and awareness about the environment. Next, the

environmental educator engaged the teachers and NGO workers to collectively

reflect on students’ responses in order to make preliminary decisions about how to

develop environmental education lessons that could challenge and develop students’

understandings about the environment.

The study took place in the Chirang District of Assam, in North East India. A

total of 277 class VIII students attending government schools, both Assamese and

Bodo language, participated in the baseline data collection. The baseline data was

collected using three specially designed assessments, 1) draw-an-environment test

(DAET), 2) environmental awareness ability measure (EAAM), and 3) card sorting

activity to rank environmental concerns. These assessments were intended to test

students’ perceptions, awareness, and concerns towards the environment. After

analyzing students’ results, it was found that while students do recognize that

humans have an impact on the environment, they do not fully understand that this

impact can often be negative. Additionally, while the students have a good

awareness of their local environment, they were primarily with environmental

problems that affect them directly and did not demonstrate an awareness of the

factors that causes these environmental problems. The researcher shared these

findings with the local teachers and NGO workers who all acknowledged there

appeared to be a disconnect between the students’ current understanding of the

environment and what the teachers and NGO workers felt was most important for

students to know about the environment. This outcome underscores the need to

incorporate more CRP into the local environmental education program to bridge

the gap between students’ and teachers’ understandings. CRP argues it is critical for

teachers to understand their students’ perspectives and not making assumptions

about students’ ideas. By understanding how their students conceptualize their own

environment, teachers will be better equipped to help students move beyond their

immediate surroundings and gain a more holistic understanding of the environment.

Doing so can help students to recognize the links between local and global

environmental issues which can support teachers to create learning spaces where

students have the ability to identify issues and the capacity to affect positive change.

Finally, this research revealed that while teachers and NGO workers are

willing to work together to design a new context specify environmental education

that is culturally relevant to students’ lived experiences, they need help for from

educational development specialist to do so. This study showed that the model used

has the potential to meaningfully connect important stakeholders in ways that

promote collaboration while keeping students’ needs at the center. Additionally, this

model is not limited to environmental education, it can also be used with a variety

of different education or development specialists. Specialists from multiple

different backgrounds could apply CRP as a framework for working with NGOs

and local teachers towards designing a variety of different educational programs

that are field-based and collaborative in nature.