How to Learn the EEEF Way: An educational process that allows values to take root

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© Yogesh Pathak

 

With this article we start articulating the 4th and final pillar of EcoUniv’s Environmental Education Framework: How to Learn/How to Teach.

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We believe that every human child, born anywhere in the world, is subject to the following internal forces and external influences as soon as it starts observing and learning from the world around it.

• An hierarchy of needs: This can be modelled in many ways, but for the time being, let’s use a common model, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

• Confirmation to the norms and belief systems within it’s family and the community around it, as well as those imparted by external influences like media, entertainment, and education. Similar confirmation to a larger global belief system.

• Curiosity about how the natural world works, how the human society works, and about the world at large

• Seeking a set of values by which to organize one’s life and shape one’s life choices.

 

Most human action is driven by the hierarchy of needs and the influence to confirm to community norms around you. When these forces are dominant, a society can remain static, with little change in it’s core values.

However human curiosity can take us in different directions of knowledge. Likewise, the process of values-seeking, if done in an authentic way and not suppressed by confirmation and the needs hierarchy, can shape life choices in a different way. New values outside the confirmation complex and needs pyramid may be discovered.  

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The holistic viewpoint about man-nature relationship is one such value: a value that the EEEF education process helps the learner to seek. We believe that the discovery and exploration of this value will lead to life choices that will break through the clutter of confirmation (e.g. blind consumption or pursuit of growth or accumulation of wealth) and also evaluate the hierarchy of needs with a fresh perspective.

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Thus the educational process or “how to learn” should be designed to help the learner discover this value, and understand what it means within the context of their growing up, and their adult life.

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It follows that the education process for EEEF must be immersive and constructivist to build the knowledge of ‘why’ sustainability before the learner explores ‘how’.

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Another essence of ‘how to learn’ under EEEF is parents’ and teacher’s appreciation of this value, and their attempts to bring it into the education process in as authentic a way as possible. Parents and teachers should aim to learn about the holistic viewpoint themselves, and jointly own the education process as a team.

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In addition to being values-focused, constructivist, and supported by parents and teachers in a genuine way, each class or field activity under EEEF should have these characteristics:

• It should exclude any biases, stereotypes, assumptions and discrimination related to gender, nationality, and socio-economic stratification.

• To the extent possible, it should draw upon the context of local ecosystems and man-nature relationships. Additional knowledge about other national or foreign contexts should be built gradually and over time, to provide a well-rounded learning experience.

• It should draw upon the full portfolio of constructivist learning techniques, including revisiting/using/correcting the existing scaffolding of knowledge acquired by the learner, multi-modal expression, collaboration, peer to peer learning, access to experts, continuous innovation, and self-paced learning.

• It should keep in mind EEEF Pillar #2, Understanding the Learner, which includes their language, family context, socioeconomic context, likes and dislikes, aspirations and interest in learning.

• The education should centre on the child, be appropriate to their age group, and conducted in their mother tongue or the language most widely used in their surroundings.

• The activities should have a harmonious blend of natural sciences, man-nature relationship, and appreciation of beauty in nature.

 

Finally, the school and parents should periodically re-evaluate the education process for it’s efficacy for delivering the EEEF purpose and content.