Get it Right: Is it Time to Imagine a Curriculum for the Planet?

It seems everyone is talking about climate change. That’s a good thing. It’s taken decades of images of melting polar ice, monster storms, droughts, floods and wild fires, and news of the extinction of a great many plants and animals to focus the world’s attention. So many advocates, so many events needed to point people in the same direction.?But here we are, finally together and arrived at this undeniable crossroads.?

There appears today an international consensus that the threat to the global climate is not only real but that human behavior over time has led to our climate’s changing condition. An abundant number of studies further underscore direct links between the degradation of Earth’s climate and the threat to human well-being—not to mention most other forms of life on this planet. Climate change is not only about the survival of the planet, but a very real challenge to our own endurance.

Much of this information about climate change has been known for some time. At present the debate is about what to do in the face of this challenge. Scientific data make clear that staying the present course of human behavior is not a survivable option.

If change is necessary, then, what should be our plan, and who should be responsible for implementing that plan?

Important discussions of climate issues are taking place in political capitals and corporate boardrooms around the world. Many more conversations are happening right now in homes and places of work and places of worship on exactly this topic—how to meet the growing threat posed by climate change.

We can hope there is a workable solution to be found. But we ought not to count on our governments to solve this crisis for us. Nor should we expect to be saved by the tremendous wealth and connectivity of the private sector. These sectors will surely have their roles to play. But it seems quite certain that no one is planning to ride in to rescue us from ourselves.

The only hope for meeting this climate challenge must be the collective actions of all of us everywhere, as individuals and through the institutions and values that unify us.

Climate change is about human behavior. Inevitably, then, all of these discussions come down to two simple questions:

1.??????How am I behaving in ways that contribute directly to the degradation of the earth’s climate as we know it?

?and

2.???????How can I behave in ways that contribute directly to the sustainability of the earth’s climate as we know it?

How should Education respond?

Perhaps the place to start is to acknowledge that education is at least partly responsible for the human behaviors that have brought us to this climate crisis. While that opinion may seem harsh, it is also hopeful. For it implies that education has an important part to play in effectively changing human behavior to achieve more sustainable, climate-friendly goals.

In every country, few institutions are so well-placed to shape human behavior in this way as are schools.?Some form of organized schooling takes place almost every day in just about every community in the world. It may be true that individuals acquire much of their world view at home through nonformal, unstructured interaction with parents or other caregivers. Children’s values and behaviors are also shaped by interactions with peers or media. But most children spend the better part of 8-12 years in systems of formal education where they interact with teaching professionals under school rules and in structured school experiences. These experiences are not without an overarching purpose.

It is through schooling, embodied and organized in the school curricula, that children begin to develop their relationship with the world outside of home. The school curriculum is designed in a developmental manner, to help young people gradually construct an expanding sense of place within the world, along with the skills and responsibilities that go with it.

The impact of the school curriculum on individual behavior should never be underestimated. The curriculum defines what children must learn and the sequence in which learning must take place. It conveys fundamental ideas and important values through a consistent set of experiences, with the targets of each stage of development expressed as benchmarks or milestones. Curriculum developers use phrases like “learners will understand, appreciate, value” ideas and competencies presented in the curriculum. Benchmark accomplishments and values are essentially tools identified in or derived from what the school community believes are necessary for children to eventually thrive in the adult world.

The curriculum is the foundation of education decision-making. From the allocation of instructional classroom time to the structure of pre-service teacher education, from lesson-planning to the development of school textbooks, and the assessment and evaluation of learning, the curriculum shapes schooling, its processes, and its expected outcomes in three important ways—

*???????????through curriculum content,

*???????????through classroom pedagogy,

*???????????through representations of reality

From time to time content is added to the curriculum with the specific intention to introduce new behaviors. For example, content to curtail the use of tobacco products and illegal drugs has been added to health education curricula to promote healthy lifestyle choices and behaviors. Content about space exploration, ethnic history, and computer literacy has been added to the science, social studies or math curriculum, with the intention to re-form values or to promote interest in careers that respond to new economic and social opportunities.

Civic education is incorporated in the general curriculum to prepare youth to take part in civic behaviors such as voting or community service. The curriculum content explains how branches of government work and how laws are enacted and enforced.

Understanding how government works can make youth knowledgeable citizens, but the content of an eighth grade civics class alone will never be sufficient to develop the beliefs, values, and habits of behavior that produce individuals who are likely to become actively engaged in their communities. The community’s civic values are learned through content that pervades and infuses all subject areas and all grade levels, from math class to the athletic field. Values are embedded in the stories children find in their readers and school libraries, in the history books, through story problems in math, even in the conclusions they might draw from science experiments.

Children learn what it means to be a good citizen through the heroes and holidays they celebrate in school. They practice good citizenship through organized school activities and events. From the time they enter public education as young children to the time they leave school as young adults, students are literally schooled in content that reflects the values and virtues of communities. Most importantly, these values shape personal choice and individual behavior.

But content information is not the only way the curriculum shapes behavior.?Also important is the curriculum’s connection to pedagogy, or the way curriculum content is taught. The curriculum can prize competition and individual achievement through recognition and rewards. Or the curriculum can promote collaboration and learning teams. Curriculum objectives like penmanship, spelling, or the ability to list information (e.g., parts of a plant, the stages of the water cycle or the multiplication tables) can be acquired through drills, rote learning, or memorization. Other content may require open-ended assignments, critical thinking, discussion, and exploration.

One way or another, the roots of adult social behavior are nurtured and developed in the fertile settings of school classrooms and school playgrounds, not just by the content students are taught but through year’s of day-to-day learning experiences proscribed by the school curriculum.?Because teachers play such an important role in the behaviors they model, it should not surprise anyone that ways of teaching can have deep and long-lasting impressions on children’s behaviors as well as concepts about themselves and the world around them.

Every change in curriculum content requires a change in teacher knowledge and pedagogical skills. Teachers must become familiar with new content, of course. But they must also develop competence in the appropriate selection and use of evidence-based teaching methods that fit those curriculum objectives. Adults who say they don’t like to read or don’t feel comfortable with science, math, composition, poetry or art are not saying they were never exposed to this content as young learners, but that they never experienced appropriate instruction in these areas when they were in school. Their values, self-concepts and behaviors are shaped not just by what they learned, but how they were taught.

In addition to content and pedagogy, the school curriculum shapes behavior through the ways content is represented. These representations of reality are nuanced and so in-grained that over time they become accepted as reality. That is, until someone shows you a world map from New Zealand with the north pole at the bottom of the map and the United States “upside-down” and not in its typically central position.

The manner in which the curriculum represents content—in language, illustrations, photographs and other images, and in maps, charts and other graphic devices—has a powerful ability to shape the way young people think about the world around them.

Children learn, for example, about the conquest of the frontier or the taming of the wilderness. Children read how humans have harnessed wild rivers and developed natural resources. Is it any wonder children become adults who think of nature as something that must be conquered and made to serve people?

After years of this, the representations in the school curriculum content become our language and our shared way of seeing. They can help us talk about what we hold important. Or they can help us justify destructive behaviors. These classroom representations of content influence the way we behave when we finally come up against the real world.?

Curriculum content, curriculum-based pedagogy and representations of curriculum content combine to structure the school experience in ways that shape human behavior.?So a good way for educators to begin to take action on climate change is to take a critical look at their school’s curricula by asking:

*???????????How does our school’s curriculum content promote behaviors that might be destructive to the planet’s climate?

*???????????How does the pedagogy teachers in our school use to implement our curriculum promote behaviors that might be destructive to the planet’s climate?

*???????????How does language and other representation of content in classrooms promote behaviors that might be destructive to the planet’s climate?

If we can identify these influencers we can begin today to question these aspects of the curriculum and then devise education strategies that re-contextualize curriculum content in ways that lead to beliefs and behaviors that are less harmful to Earth’s environment.

A more long-term solution, of course, is to develop a completely new curriculum, a curriculum for a healthy planet and healthy people. That really is our challenge. Can we educators construct a new curriculum that will shape individual behaviors in ways that support the sustainability of life on this planet? We can and we must.

A Curriculum for the Planet

Many teachers and parents consider the curriculum fixed and immutable. It is important to remember that curricula change over time. Ideas we hold today about the purpose of education and the way this purpose is expressed by the school curriculum come to us from ancient time through the Age of Reason, to the Industrial Age and beyond. We do not have the same curricula that served ancient Greeks or the Renaissance. Each age modifies the school curriculum to serve its unique priorities. In every era, the curriculum is the fluid result of a mix of ideas past, present and of the future.

Nevertheless, the school curriculum is not just a random collection of knowledge and skills. Education is always purposeful. Schooling is always for something. Through the ages, school curricula have proven to be powerful instruments of social engineering and economic activity.

In a post-independence context, public education might be used to promote national unity and national identity. In an industrial context public education might be used to combat child labor and to guard child health and safety. Or to seed interest in occupations of great value to the community or nation.

The school curriculum of each age aims to develop specific worldviews and values appropriate for the challenges of the day. This list includes such familiar themes as equality and justice, better living through technology and science, and tolerance for diversity. The pointed outcomes of various teaching methodologies have at times included behaviors such as basic communication and computation. The pedagogy embedded in the school curriculum has produced a variety of behaviors, including an ability to persist at monotonous tasks, obedience to rules, the ability to set goals and monitor progress for independent learning, and the ability to work productively with others.

In this age of climate challenge, educators must bring their expertise to the crucial activity of building a new curriculum for the planet. As suggested above, the challenge is simply too overwhelming to be addressed by the addition of new chapter in the science curriculum, or a new set of teaching techniques.

We cannot expect to shape climate sustainable choices and new ways of interacting with the Earth, while maintaining a curriculum that was purposefully organized to inculcate the values of an industrializing world, a set of values that is largely at odds with climate sustainability. This task will require re-conceptualizing the school curriculum in a way that serves the attitudes and aspirations of this new era. Climate-friendly values must be infused throughout the curriculum. It cannot be relegated to the periphery of importance while climate destructive beliefs and behaviors are allowed to remain dominant and celebrated. The relationship between humans and the natural world must be central in all aspects of schooling.

We educators hold a key position of professional leadership and responsibility, entrusted to us by our own communities and nations, to help prepare young people for the future. What are the values that should undergird a Curriculum for the Planet? What are the competencies that will enable individuals and the planet to thrive? These and other questions should be our contribution to the current public discussion. How can the attitudes and habits of mind that embody climate-friendly values and visions be incorporated into effective behavior-building school curricula? That is our area of expertise.

We need not wait to receive this Curriculum for the Planet from government or the private sector. We can, however, invite these and other institutions into this important process. Teachers, we can lead.

A curriculum that helps reorient understanding of our relationship with this planet could help stimulate ideas that might lead today’s youth into climate-valuable careers in the future. It can help shape human behaviors that will contribute to climate sustainability. A curriculum for the planet could be good for the future of kids. It could also be vital for the future of the Earth.

A school curriculum for the planet could well be our era’s greatest legacy in the global fight to save our world.

Let’s get it right.