Teach Earth: The benefits of inter-disciplinary backgrounds in environmental education
15th August 2023
Teach Earth: In The Field is a residential weekend delivered to educators face-to-face in an inspiring natural environment. Our Learning & Engagement Coordinator, Emilija Rudzinskaite, reflects on why bringing together a group of people with a wide range of different backgrounds is so valuable and important within the environmental education sector.
Bringing together people from inter-disciplinary backgrounds sparks inspiring conversations (image: Teach Earth in the Field 2023)
When the call is put out that Teach Earth In The Field is open to the wider community, a unique mix of educators put themselves forward. We meet teachers with a background in the arts and microbiology, council workers, community organisers and foresters and those with a personal passion for writing, entrepreneurship or coaching mindfulness. The secret ingredient to a successful residential weekend is creating space to share all these life experiences, whether in past or current roles, and providing opportunities to collaborate, learn from each other and gain a wider understanding of just how diverse this environmental education sector is, and how much more diverse it can be.
The facilitators don’t expect all the participants to come already being Eco-Club Leads or Forest School Leads, well-versed in all things environmental and outdoor education. In fact, the wonderful random variety of interests and experiences is exactly what is needed to create an inclusive, inspired and courageous environmental educator community.
Creating meaningful and unique content
To start off, the fresh perspective that an individual can bring from their unique background creates a channel for distinctive and meaningful content creation. Educators do not want, or need, to flood the environmental education space with hundreds of iterations of the same activity. Building on the path of those that came before, one can breathe new life into a well-known topic if they have a surprising twist to it. If you have already looked at leaf stomata under the microscope a dozen times, maybe today is the day that someone will suggest you make a leaf ‘stop sweating’ by spreading a layer of Vaseline on it, studying both the properties of this substance and its effects on natural life? Or if the students in an Economics class feel disillusioned with the focus on profit, could they discuss the concepts of degrowth or circular economy instead?
The novel ideas and ways of thinking can be the inspiration a teacher needs to keep teaching the same topic for the tenth or fifteenth time.
Only the richness of a variety of backgrounds can help sustain the effort of teaching about the environment in new, intriguing and relevant ways as technology and sources of knowledge keep advancing and galloping forward.
Reaching a wider audience and connecting communities
As well as feeding the varied experiences into the environmental education sphere, the participants can also draw on the links and networks from their previous roles to share resources and connections. As professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds, the participants often know a few former colleagues with similar career paths that can be their sounding boards and keep them up to date with new developments, as well as a handful of inspiring individuals who might be thought leaders in their sector, but unfamiliar to people outside the community, whether that is in engineering, business, local government or the arts. These connections are hugely helpful in a few ways.
Educators can provide a platform for people leading sustainable change and innovation in their sector to talk to young people and hear their reflections and views. This also has the follow-on effect of making developments in a particular sector more well-known to pupils, creating a shared experience and language and raising the bar of expectation that children and young people might have for the world they live in. One example shared at Teach Earth in The Field was inviting a town planner to talk about the local council’s plans for rewilding and regeneration, and what young people would seek to change.
Making new connections (image: Teach Earth in the Field 2023)
Similarly, if an educator has a background or connections in engineering, their school could organise a trip to a renewable energy producer (or use the STEM Ambassador Community to make this connection) and challenge the school to look into producing its own energy too, perhaps even forming a community project. It makes the best of existing professional networks and subject knowledge, creates accountability, awareness and interest, therefore normalising the disruptive way of thinking that is urgently needed to achieve sustainability around the world.
Connecting communities can also have the effect of showcasing the many diverse and sustainable career paths and achievements which can provide young people with aspiration, such as this list of 100 inspiring UK-based environmentalists, who are all women. Who do you know in your life that you wish a class of eager 5-year-olds could meet and learn from, who could shift the pupils’ values towards sustainability, caring for the environment and speaking up against injustice?
Giving children opportunities for exposure to the environmental sector holds everyone across society to higher standards, creates cohesion and provides a platform for excellence across communities and sectors at this crucial time when values are shifting and solutions get implemented.
Embracing messy real-life experiences
By now we might be thinking, ‘this can become overwhelming, all these networks and connections colliding into each other… Isn’t it easier to wear one hat at a time?’ The answer to that would be no! Life experience is never clear-cut, particularly for pupils just getting their first glimpses at their possible futures. Neither are our career paths and trajectories or the circumstances in which pupils gain and practise new skills. Indeed, these textures and different shades bring us the richness of experience that make us individual, that forge unique life paths combining skills from previous jobs and chapters of our lives. We all take up a distinct shape in society that couldn’t be filled by anyone else, and we shape-shift as we upskill and evolve our expertise, too.
The environmental sector sorely needs all these individuals, with their colours and textures. Each one brings the learnings about a rich variety of real-life experiences and contexts into life, which can inform how environmental education can be applied across different subjects, themes and circumstances.
Having a teacher who is also a mindfulness coach on our Teach Earth In The Field weekend showed the power of collaboration, as passing the proverbial microphone in one of our sessions widened our field of vision to more opportunities and provided lived experience that can be applied across various education settings, whether that is circle time in Reception or supporting the transition to secondary school.
Finding new ways to connect with nature (image: Teach Earth in the Field 2023)
Witnessing a blend of experiences and passions can inspire a child with a particular set of interests to combine them in an unexpected way, like learning the names of bird species in Japanese, as shared by one other of our Teach Earth participants. It sets the child off on a path of discovery and attainment that is uniquely theirs, that contributes something new to the community and gives agency and a sense of achievement, with a solid set of values at the core.
The journeys of the individuals that find themselves at Teach Earth can be hugely varied, but the shared space and time to learn from each other’s respective best practice and expertise contributes a priceless quality to each newly formed community of educators. The collective power to bring all the life’s learnings and pinpoint moments of opportunity and collaboration is a potent one, held within the hands of each of our participants.
If you are interested in attending a Teach Earth programme, please visit our website for more information Teach Earth (earthwatch.org.uk).
If you would like to support teachers and children by sponsoring Teach Earth, and discover the impact your organisation could make, get in touch here: Teachers can’t teach what they don’t know…. (shorthandstories.com)