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What is an Environmental Action Education Project?

Environmental action projects involve students in tackling an environmental issue or problem, or working to improve an environmental setting. The term "environment" here is used holistically, and includes the many social, cultural, and economic contexts we all work and live in. Therefore, environmental action projects can include health issues like access to safe drinking water, social justice issues such as fair trade, and global issues like sustainable agriculture.

An action project can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it: from making and maintaining a community notice board of environmental events to developing and implementing a plan for walking school buses. Action projects are often most successful when focused at the local community level, where contacts, issues and efforts usually have the most relevance.

Why Do Action Education?

Environmental education includes three critical components: developing awareness and appreciation for the environment, leading to knowledge and understanding of environmental, social and economic systems, which in turn creates the potential and capacity for appropriate actions.

As educators, we nurture awareness of the environment, and teach students about ecological systems, habitats, biodiversity, interdependence and cultural connections. Yet what of the action component - does having knowledge about an issue lead directly to taking action? Do we really prepare students to critically analyze and address real-world problems? Environmental issues and problems are not problems of the environment, but the results of social and economic organizations, systems and actions. To be effective in taking appropriate action, one must be able to understand these systems.

Schools are traditionally seen as places for learning about things, rather than how to do things. Action projects provide venues for skills development, practice and field-testing, and support students in actually taking responsible action on issues and problems that affect them and their community.

Action learning is an important part of education because it:

• helps students develop control over their lives. Too often students are left feeling overwhelmed at the enormity of environmental problems, and disconnected from "the system" and society as a whole. Through taking action on a problem , students begin to understand that they have the power to bring about positive and significant change. (Hammond, 1993)
• enhances creative and critical thinking skills by making learning relevant, alive and real. Students have opportunities to practice skills of enquiry, values analysis, clarification and problem-solving in relevant, real life situations.
• facilitates the development of knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Action projects move students beyond information acquisition as they learn to apply skills and information in new contexts and demonstrate transfer of familiar principles and procedures. (Emmons, 1997)
• integrates diverse subject areas. Science, social studies and language arts are at the core of many environmental issues. Students who work to save a wetland area may study the plants and animals that live there, apply geography and mapping skills to chart the area, research and write articles about the human impacts that threaten the area, and create murals of indigenous peoples' historical and present use of wetlands.
• connects students to the broader community. When students develop more community perspective and commitment they become "bonded" to their communities and enhance their sense of place, of belonging to something beyond their families and school. (Hoose, 1993)
• provides opportunities to develop citizenship skills. Many programs have demonstrated that if students learn basic action skills and play a positive role in solving problems that are of personal importance to them, they will act within the democratic system as responsible citizens, in school and after graduation.
• provides opportunities for students to build teamwork and cooperative learning skills. Action projects often depend on working effectively ingroups, skills that will serve students for the rest of their lives. Also, having students interact in groups enables them to focus on tasks that use their natural strengths and learning styles. Artistic students may draw publicity posters, confident speakers may interview community members and those with good interpersonal skills might do some fund-raising.

Action projects often depend on working effectively in groups, skills that will serve students for the rest of their lives. Also, having students interact in groups enables them to focus on tasks that use their natural strengths and learning styles. Artistic students may draw publicity posters, confident speakers may interview community members and those with good interpersonal skills might do some fund-raising.

"The principle goal of education is to create people who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done - people who are creative, inventive and discoverers. … So we need pupils who are active, who learn early to find out by themselves, who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them."- Piaget