environmental education: a romantic replies to a hard-liner

wesley miller -- the science teacher -- nov 73

the question of whether instruction should center primarily on the content of the disciplines or the experience of the learner is pertinent to environmental education just as it is to other fields of knowledge. In the letter which follows, a college teacher takes a position strongly differing with a colleague. The letter is authentic; the name of the recipient has been changed ... [ very slightly modified by mbl ]

i've been thinking about your comment on field trips. It went something like this, I believe ...

"our program stresses content. We've got too many teachers who are know-nothings.

You should hear some of the misinformation they give out.

It's terrible and it isn't necessary.

For example, I heard one say the moon was not a satellite.

On our Florida trips to the Everglades we hit the disciplines.

We have a geologist, an oceanographer, and an anthropologist.

We deal in math and chemistry, and we give the teachers a solid test in each of the disciplines. We work seven days a week.

When they come back they know something.

How can you teach something if you don't know it ?

I don't want people just playing around. My problem is to get people to stick with content. The rest is nonsense.

when you said all this, I sat mute.

I felt intimidated.

What you were saying seemed so strong, so morally right.

How could anyone speak out against "real learning?"

still, in my mind I knew I had something to say. Now in the quiet of my room perhaps I can express what I then lacked the facility to utter.

sorry, George, but I simply don't agree with your point of view. Not that what you are doing isn't all right. It's just that I see it as limited. It takes too shallow a view of human life, of learning, of what is knowledge.

i do not disagree with the value of knowing content. Learning the content of the various disciplines can be useful, and it can be satisfying experience to acquire the knowledge. I happen to have learned quite a lot about the solar system. I knew a lot of facts, and I can talk at considerable length about the planets. This is satisfying to me, and it is instructive to my students.

but that is not all there is to know of the planets. Here is something else to know. Two years ago I sat at dusk on a bluff in California and watched the sun as it slipped below the Pacific horizon. It was a glorious, shimmering, round, red disk. Or at least it started as a disk. When the sun gets close to the horizon it becomes flattened and then takes on the appearance of a series of bands. One by one these bands settle below the rim of the earth until a tiny flash of light signals the end of another day ... the end of another day of my life.

that night, Venus was bright in the sky, so I stayed there on the bluff, waiting the hour or so for it to set. While I sat there I wondered, will Venus too, turn red as it approaches the horizon ? The sun had turned so spectacularly red, and Venus seemed so brilliant. I couldn't help but wonder, would Venus turn red, too ?

What do you think, George ?> Do you think Venus ever turns red when it sets ?

Perhaps the answer to that is in a book, and I could learn it without observing it; but I've never read it, and that night I found the answer.

It is yes.

I was genuinely pleased watching it happen.

small event perhaps, but a magic hour for me. One I have not forgotten. Isn't that one of the meanings of life, to find such magic hours?

george, I want my student to find magic hours. You said a teacher cannot teach what he does not know.

I say there are things a teacher knows that he cannot teach.

There are no words to teach such thing.

But what I can do is to tell my students that such joys do exist, and in the field, I can set up situations in the hope that they, too will come to the knowledge it has been my privilege to enjoy. God know, in a city altogether too few people know these pleasures.

i hasten to add that knowing the content of the related disciplines can greatly add to one's enjoyment of these events. Knowing what I do about Venus ... even just knowing that it WAS Venus ... made possible that Pacific experience.

That is WHY content is important; that is why my students learn it.

you say your students work seven days a week on their field trips. Seven days a week learning content?

what I have been describing is the aesthetics of the out-of-doors. But what is really at issue goes much deeper than that. I am really talking about a philosophy of education ... what it ought to be. The point of view I represent is based on two hypotheses:

( l ) the impact of environmental education comes from the total experience of the learners.

( 2 ) people are different, so what they learn is different.

let's take the first: the total experience of the learner.

You say a person cannot teach what he does not know.

I disagree.

When my students are experiencing me ... whether I am lecturing in a classroom, drinking coffee, or hiking down a trail ... they are learning all sorts of things from me ( and about me ) that I am not consciously trying to teach. Some of these things I do not know myself. This is what John Dewey called the collateral curriculum. And I believe on the basis of my personal experience that much of this is very important.

For I am a model for them, and the kind of person I am influences the kinds of person they are to become. Perhaps oftentimes I am a negative model, but that is all right ... we learn from negative models, too.

then there are the personal relationships.

One of the beauties of environmental education is that it gives people a chance to come to know one another outside the classroom. These relationships are terribly important in understanding other human beings, and our personal selves through other people.

all these things help us to come to know the closeness and the diversity of the human family. These learnings are vital, and I, the teacher, tend to them when planning the curriculum.
and what of the personal learnings about one's physical self ? Social critics deplore human estrangement from their own body. Rightly so, I think. But when I hike a group of teachers over a mountain path or canoe them across a lake or sleep them on the ground or climb them up a fire tower, I am contributing to their knowledge of themselves.

For some it is not happy learning; for others it is enervating; for all it is important

. i am most interest in those learning which truly make a personal difference in the lives of my students. I want my students to come away from any course I teach feeling that their experience with me made a significant difference to them, that they are better persons in some important way because of our association. And I have come to believe that very little of what I teach directly ever accomplishes this. Certainly very little content. What counts comes from our human interactions. It comes from the touching of my self to their self.

i suppose this sounds grandiose, and I agree. I'm sure it doesn't happen very often that I touch a student deeply, personally. But it does happen occasionally, I think, because it does happen that occasionally a student touches my life in such a way that it significantly influences me.

Perhaps the reverse it true, too.

let me speak of attitudes. I want my students to come away from their experience in environmental education feeling that they want to continue to know ... must continue to know ... the out-of-doors as an integral part of their personal lives for the remainder of their days.

I want them ...

hiking for the joy of it on Sunday afternoons. seeking out the call of the loon because I said it was unforgettable, and they know from the others things we did that this must be so.

I want them to watch wild creatures because they are fascinating and because theyÕre are things to be learned from them.

In short, I want them to come to love the earth.

And if they can learn to love the earth, then perhaps they will become active in the fight to protect it from the depredations of the human population. finally, there is a moral component.

My relationship with the earth is a moral one. There is no escaping this once I become conscious of it. I am responsible for my acts, both of commission and of omission. So are my students, through too few are like to be aware of it when they first come into my class. When they leave, I hope they will have gained a sense of the moral responsibility they bear in improving the quality of life on this planet. If I can succeed in this perhaps they can pass this consciousness on to their students who will in turn pass it on to others in an ever- widening circle.

now for my second hypothesis:

people are different, therefore what they learn is different.

On field trips let me stand on the shoreline while your chemist mystifies me with his symbols. You will say I an not paying attention. You will be wrong. I'll be attending

I will want to . . .

I will not, of course, for I will be learning from your chemist. But he will not be touching me in the place where I can most deeply respond. There will be others he will not truly touch, either:

Some students will be wholly with him, for they love chemistry. And are they are any better persons than me ?

No.

I think not.

Different, to be sure, but hardly better.

but are the listeners to the chemist learning and the non listeners not learning ?

No.

The chemistry lovers are learning more, for they are be instructed in what they love. The others are learning a bit of chemistry, too, but mostly they are learning whatever lures them to divert their attention whether it is the scenery, the person brushing up against as it is with that youthful, hot-blooded couple, or what is going on in his own head as it is with Albert, the thinker.

What we learn depends upon what kind of souls we be.

Each of us selects form the vast range of possibilities inherent in any environment those things which are most true to the essence of our individual selves.

This is called learning. It is idiosyncratic. It cannot much be forced out of joint. And this is why I say: Let us have ...

so let us stand on this magnificent place called ... the beach ... and admire the diversity of the human family, because I have a lot to learn from my students .... and do you know what, George ?

They might even learn something from me.

I hope you did.

I really do.