Integrating Green Studies into Existing Curriculum

EEI (Education and Environment Initiative) is now in the Education Code for all schools in California K-12. How does it "green" the existing curriculum? Website here.

Take 11th grade History-Social Sciences. It focuses on major turning points in 20th century history and geography. It is a vast topic but EEI is offering 4 possible units:

  - Mass Production, Marketing, and Consumption in the Roaring Twenties
  - Postwar Industries and the Emerging Environmental Movement
  - The United States and Mexico – Working Together
  - Many Voices, Many Visions: Analyzing Contemporary Environmental Issues

Take the first one. It looks at “the rise of mass production, the growth of cities, the impact of new technologies (e.g. the automobile, electricity)” and greens it by looking at the environmental impact of automobiles, roads, plastics, landfills and recycling, electric lighting and other mass-produced goods from the 1920s till now.

For example, there is a section on “California’s Waste Tire Problem”. If 11th graders, who are learning to drive, realize that the tires on their car can be a pollutant, they should be asked to come up with creative solutions for what to do with tires (like rubberized asphalt), to research the raw materials that go into tires (which brings in chemistry), where they are recycled (politics and policy) and explore the future of tires (e.g. Michelin’s Tweel). Problem-solving is a lot more interesting than simply describing a problem and leaving it at that.

But it wouldn’t be just tires. There is urban planning and transportation, oil and plastics, batteries, air pollution and a host of other topics. What do students think of roads that are built for automobiles instead of people (should Ventura Blvd be a freeway or a local street?), or whether plastic shopping bags should be banned (can they participate in LA River clean-up?), or whether AA batteries should go into landfills (can they start recycling them at home?).

All of these offer a way for kids to invite guest speakers, make individual field trips, pursue research projects and generally take ownership over topics, so that history and geography are no longer just an abstraction but something that might offer them a job some day.

Photo: Wikipedia/Paul Glazzard