Foundation of Environmental Education

 Foundation Environmental Education

Foundation of Environmental Education

unit 3 

Introduction 

 "Environmental literacy and sustainability stem from a person’s relationship with their place 

Environmental education is a process that allows individuals to explore environmental issues, engage in problem solving, and take action to improve the environment. 

  Environmental Education (EE) features

1.Environmental Education:     Is a learning process that expands individuals’ information and mindfulness about nature’s domain and related difficulties, creates the vital abilities and mastery to address the difficulties, instills confidence and stewardship and cultivates demeanor, inspirations, and responsibilities to settle on educated choices and make dependable moves in the field that they are working with.          

2. Is an inter-disciplinary field that integrates fields such as biology, ecology, earth science, geography, atmospheric science and mathematics because understanding how the environment works and keeping it healthy requires knowledge and skills from many disciplines.

3. Includes all efforts to make the general public aware of the knowledge of the environment and environmental challenges through print materials, media, brochures, bulletins, videos, or other media techniques.

4. Leads to responsible individual and group actions.

5. Provides information about specific environmental concerns or problems to the general public instead of specific group, religion or community.

6. Works to help you think critically so that you aren’t sitting there trying to fit everything into a neat little box.

7. Involves students in different data-gathering techniques that help them to discuss, analyze, predict and interpret data about environmental issues.

8. Is study centered, promotes higher-level thinking skills and relevant to student’s everyday lives.

9. It allows people to discuss complex environmental problems that have no simple answers.

10. It is a process in which individuals gain information about environmental awareness and acquire knowledge, skills, values, experiences, and determination, which can help them to solve different environmental problems

Components of Environmental Education

There are a number of different parts attached to environmental education. The most common segments of environmental education that you will come across during your studies can include the following:

• Awareness and Mindfulness: Mindfulness and affectability to nature’s turf and environmental difficulties that you may encounter as a result of being in the corporate sector today.
• Knowledge and Learning: Learning and understanding of nature and environmental difficulties that are holding people back and/or causing the world to change in negative ways.
• Attitudes: Disposition of sympathy toward nature’s domain and inspiration to enhance or keep up the environmental quality, which will spill over into any plans that you make or anything else that you do that is related to the organization that you currently are working in or developing.
• Skills: Aptitudes to recognize and help resolve environmental difficulties in a practical manner that matches up with the current trends and technologies that are out there today.
• Participation: Investment in programs and projects that help reduce the effect of environmental difficulties, thereby making sure that the money you’re investing is going to help the environment instead of harming it.
• Promotion of Green Facilities: Making the green initiatives popular and also providing the required infrastructure to help out with the development of several environmental aspects. Promotion of green facilities like a self-sustainable kitchen or even a self-sustaining school could be promoted to boost awareness among the public as well as to help with the promotion of better environmental relationships.

Tbilisi Declaration (1977)

The world's first intergovernmental conference on environmental education was organized by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in cooperation with the U.N. Environment Programmed (UNEP) and was convened in Tbilisi, Georgia (USSR) from October 14-26, 1977.

Delegates from 66 member states and observers from two nonmember states participated. Representatives and observers from eight U.N. agencies and programs also participated. Three other intergovernmental organizations and 20 international nongovernmental organizations also were represented. In all, 265 delegates and 65 representatives and observers took part in the conference.

The Tbilisi Declaration was adopted by acclamation at the close of the intergovernmental conference. The declaration noted the unanimous accord in the important role of environmental education in the preservation and improvement of the world's environment, as well as in the sound and balanced development of the world's communities.

The Role, Objectives, and Characteristics of Environmental Education

The Tbilisi Declaration together with two of the recommendations of the Conference constitutes the framework, principles, and guidelines for environmental education at all levels—local, national, regional, and international—and for all age groups both inside and outside the formal school system.

               The Conference recommends the adoption of certain criteria which will help to guide efforts to develop environmental education at the national, regional, and global levels:

1. Whereas it is a fact that biological and physical features constitute the natural basis of the human environment, its ethical, social, cultural, and economic dimensions also play their part in determining/he lines of approach and the instruments whereby people may understand and m~e better use of natural resources in satisfying their needs.

1. Environmental education is the result of the reorientation and dovetailing of different disciplines and educational experiences which facilitate an integrated perception of the problems of the environment, enabling more rational actions capable of meeting social needs to be taken.

1. A basic aim of environmental education is to succeed in making individuals and communities understand the complex nature of the natural and the built environments resulting from the interaction of their biological, physical, social, economic, and cultural aspects, and acquire the ~knowledge, values, attitudes, and practical skills to participate in a responsible and effective way in anticipating and solving environmental problems, and in the management of the quality of the environment.

1. A further basic aim of environmental education is clearly to show the economic, political, and ecological interdependence of the modern world, in which decisions and actions by different countries can have international repercussions. Environmental education should, in this regard, help to develop a sense of responsibility and solidarity among countries and regions as the foundation for a new international order which will guarantee the conservation and improvement of the environment.

Special attention should be paid to understanding the complex relations between socio-economic development and the improvement of the environment.

For this purpose, environmental education should provide the necessary knowledge for interpretation of the complex phenomena that shape the environment, encourage those ethical, economic, and esthetic values which, constituting the basis of self-discipline, will further the development of conduct compatible with the preservation and improvement of the environment. It should also provide a wide range of practical skills required in the devising and application of effective solutions to environmental problems.

To carry out these tasks, environmental education should bring about a closer link between educational processes and real life, building its activities around the environmental problems that are faced by particular communities and focusing analysis on these by means of an interdisciplinary, comprehensive approach which will permit a proper understanding of environmental problems.

Environmental education should cater to all ages and socio-professional groups in the population. It should be addressed to (a) the general nonspecialist public of young people and adults whose daily conduct has a decisive influence on the preservation and improvement of the environment; (b) to particular social groups whose professional activities affect the quality of the environment; and © to scientists and technicians whose specialized research and work will lay the foundations of knowledge on which education, training, and efficient management of the environment should be based.

To achieve the effective development of environmental education, full advantage must be taken of all public and private facilities available to society for the education of the population: the formal education system, different forms of nonformal education, and the mass media.

To make an effective contribution towards improving the environment, educational action must be linked with legislation, policies, measures of control, and the decisions that governments may adopt in relation to the human environment
The categories of environmental education objectives are:

1. Awareness—to help social groups and individuals acquire an awareness and sensitivity to the total environment and its allied problems.
2. Knowledge—to help social groups and individuals gain a variety of experience in, and acquire a basic understanding of, the environment and its associated problems.
3. Attitudes—to help social groups and individuals acquire a set of values and feelings of concern for the environment and the motivation for actively participating in environmental improvement and protection.
4. Skills—to help social groups and individuals acquire the skills for identifying and solving environmental problems.
5. Participation—to provide social groups and individuals with an opportunity to be actively involved at all levels in working toward resolution of environmental problems.     

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entry covers:

Industrial development :

 (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking

Development of Individual 

(1) the development of the discipline from the 1960s and 1970s;for improving the quality of food ,clothing and shelther ,new method of agriculture andcivilization.

  The connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics;  the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns

Global level development the broader concerns of some thinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics of poverty; and the ethics of sustainability and climate change.

Approach to teaching Environmental Education

Interdisciplinary: 

Inter disciplinary approach in environmental education includes the working of the people which are concerned over a single unit while in the case of the multi-disciplinary approach, the working of the people associated with the environment across multiple units.

Multidisciplinary In the multidisciplinary approach, environment topics are dispersed or infused into various single disciplinary courses. In the other words, the environmental perspective is integrated into the other disciplines.

Environmental education encourages learning about environmental systems. In particular, it is concerned with encouraging more sustainable interactions between the human and natural world. Related fields include education for sustainable development and the more progressiv field of eco-pedagogy.

The techniques must ensure maximum involvement of the learners and provide enough opportu- nities for students to experience the environment, actual or simulated. Being true for any other subject, active and varied techniques are necessitated because studies on cognitive development reveal that student participation is a key to success in learning. The extent of active participation of the learner in the teaching-learning process is an excellent index of the quality of teaching.

Through active participation. learning becomes internalised and becomes part of learner's cognitive structure. Learning becomes meaningful and permanent. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Bruner's theory of concept formation support these beliefs.

Though varied methods can be used to teach same concept. some concepts lend themselves better to certain methods than others.

 5 th June World Environmental Day 

   

World Environment Day 2023 to be celebrated with a thrust on  Mission LiFE

Posted On: 05 MAY 2023 8:35PM by PIB Delhi

World Environment Day (June 5) is an occasion which brings together millions of people across the country for awareness and action for the environment. This year, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India envisages liberating the World Environment Day 2023 with a thrust on the Mission LIFE. The concept of LIFE, i.e., Lifestyle for Environment was introduced by the Prime Minister, at the World Leaders' Summit in Glasgow at the 2021 UNFCCC COP26, when he gave a clarion call to rekindle a global pursuit to adopt sustainable lifestyle and practices. Mass mobilization across the country on Life is being organized in the run-up to the celebrations.

The theme for World Environment Day on 5 June 2023 will focus on solutions to plastic pollution under the campaign #BeatPlasticPollution.

The world is being inundated by plastic. More than 400 million Tonnes of plastic is produced every year, half of which is designed to be used only once. Of that, less than 10 per cent is recycled. An estimated 19-23 million tonnes end up in lakes, rivers and seas. Today, plastic clogs our landfills, leaches into the ocean and is combusted into toxic smoke, making it one of the gravest threats to the planet.

Not only that, what is less known is that microplastics find their way into the food we eat, the water we drink and even the air we breathe. Many plastic products contain hazardous additives, which may pose a threat to our health.

The good news is that we have science and solutions to tackle the problem –and a lot is already happening. What is needed most now is a surge of public and political pressure to scale up and speed actions from governments, companies and other stakeholders to solve this crisis. This underscores the importance of this World Environment Day mobilising action from every corner of the world.

Individual and community actions underpin the systemic change required to transition to a less plastic-dependent economy, meaning everyone, you included, can play a role!

https://www.unep.org/resources/report/drowning-plastics-marine-litter-and-plastic-waste-vital-graphics

Say no to Plastic to save  Earth .