Dealing With the Fallout: Tread Lightly When You Carry a Green Stick

            So, what happens after you’ve successfully implemented a place-based, community-focused, developmentally appropriate approach to environmental education? Hopefully you’ll be one step closer toward achieving your lofty outcome, but along the way you’re likely to run into people whose perspective will differ from yours. Objectors commonly claim that environmental educators are short on facts and long on cultivating unnecessary fear. Others argue that teachers who employ these methods are advocates rather than objective educators who consider many sides of the issue.

            David L. Larsen, in his address Be Relevant or Become a Relic, said, “The resource benefits when resource professionals are secure enough in their own perspective and beliefs to step outside those beliefs and enable others to care about the resource for their own reasons.” In this passage, the resource refers to the object of your project or program, be it a watershed district, invasive specie, or other issue that faces your community. It underscores the importance of learning the facts, and hearing all sides of the story.

            Presenting multiple points of view and embracing a diversity of perspectives is important for many reasons. It creates more opportunities for buy-in from the community and maximizes ownership through partnerships. For example, projects or programs that aim to save the community money are great motivators for involving business interests in collaboration. Additionally, Larsen says, “It creates an environment of respect that allows for dialogue rather than conflict.” When you’re under attack, it’s easy to get defensive and hard to share the power, but it’s important to at least try to start from a place where you are listening to the concerns of the other constituencies. Usually it’s not a matter of, “my way or the highway,” but building a new road together.

            Finally, it’s important to recognize when you have a dog in the fight. Some people are just not interested in what you have to say. This might happen when a situation is emotionally charged, when there is a strong political or ideological agenda at play, or when people are fearful of change and its impact on their life. Often these entities already care a great deal about your project or program, but you are at two ends of the same spectrum.

            To add to your “Dealing With the Fallout” toolkit, I’ll close with a few excerpts from Tread Lightly When You Carry a Green Stick in David Sobel’s handbook, Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities. Here, Sobel illustrates that sometimes all it takes to win over the detractors is not changing the program, but changing the language that you use to describe it:

Environmental education often raises people’s hackles…Our challenge [is] to develop a strategy that respect[s] the various perspectives in the community and to find a form of environmental education that honor[s] local economic and ecological realities…In the beginning, the Community-based School Environmental Education (CO-SEED) materials talked about educating for “ecological literacy,” which for many in the North Country translated into tree hugging. They assumed we wanted to teach children that cutting down trees was bad and that by extension, people that cut down trees (their parents) were also bad…The program explores the history of people’s relationship with the land just the way an environmental education program would, but “cultural heritage” has less baggage than “environmental education,” and places environmental issues within a broader context. Similarly, we have found it more effective to talk about “place-based education” rather than “ecological literacy.” Sometimes, we elaborate and refer to “community- and place-based education,” to give equal emphasis to cultural and natural contexts for learning…In community- and place-based education we need to find the same kind of balance between environmental quality and economic vitality…Place-based education is about connecting people to people, as well as connecting people to nature.

Learn more:

Teaching controversial environmental issues: neutrality and balance in the reality of the classroom (redirects to a downloadable pdf file)

Educational Research, Vol. 48, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 223–241

Written by Deborah R. E. Cotton, University of Plymouth, UK

Abstract (abbreviated):

         Environmental issues are frequently controversial and involve conflicting interests and values. Much environmental education literature explicitly encourages teachers to promote pro- environmental attitudes and behaviors amongst their students, despite evidence that teacher support for such a policy is ambiguous at best. The literature on teaching controversial issues provides conflicting advice for teachers, though many authors advocate the adoption of a neutral or balanced approach. However, there has to date been little research into the strategies which teachers actually adopt in teaching about controversial environmental issues.

This research aimed to address the gap in the literature by investigating the beliefs and practices of three experienced geography teachers teaching controversial environmental issues in English secondary schools. The study draws upon both interview data and transcripts of classroom interaction.

Why is teaching environmental science so controversial?

“But, there really isn’t anything controversial about environmental science, if the topics are taught with honesty, citing respectable sources and allowing probing questions, then the benefits of educating in this area far outweigh the risks of ignoring that environmental elephant.” 

Teaching About Controversial Issues

This site highlights some effective teaching strategies for engaging learners with controversial issues, and helping them create their own opinions.

Compiled by Erin E. Anderson