After taking an environmental inventory of their Denver community, 7th graders at Cole Middle School came up with a problem to tackle: their drinking water "tasted funny." Maybe it was unhealthy; maybe the taste came from the purifying chemicals added by Denver Water. Whatever the cause, they wanted to find it and, if something was wrong, find ways to fix it. Cole is one of seven pilot schools in the Denver area participating in Earth Force, an environmental and community service learning program based in Alexandria, Virginia, but with a national reach.
For their science teacher, Robert Gatewood, these students presented a real challenge; they were a class that other teachers had given up on. The principal had canceled their field trips as punishment for acting out, but they didn't seem to care. Eighty percent were from low socioeconomic backgrounds; almost all needed an outlet that would keep them out of trouble. As Gatewood told a local newspaper, "Some 7th graders are disrespectful and don't want to accept any kind of responsibility. Projects like Earth Force show them they can make a difference."
Earth Force programs are fully integrated into either the science or social studies curriculum—usually both; the program is not used as a replacement. After establishing a relationship with school officials and having received an invitation to work in a given school, Earth Force conducts two-day summer training and planning sessions for teams of interested teachers, who decide how best to integrate the model into their curriculum. Typically, teachers develop program and lesson plans for a year or half a year, which they then implement with continuing consultation with Earth Force staff. For example, teachers are required to attend monthly planning and feedback sessions. Two follow-up training sessions are also conducted during the school year. Leadership teams from community organizations sponsoring Earth Force projects are recruited in the same way as teachers and receive the same training.
The Problem Years
The middle school years are, to put it euphemistically, a troubling time, marked by adolescent uncertainties over values, the tides of peer pressure, and raging hormones. As middle school teachers know, their charges are at once charming and abrasive, as intense as they are distracted. Their life energies verge perpetually on short-circuit. Settled norms and institutions that kept values focused during childhood—family, school, and church—they now see as "bogus." At this age, the gap between formal learning and real life starts to widen as meaningful contexts for real accomplishment dwindle to a precious few.
Earth Force has staked its organizational life on the premise that youngsters living in such a world are not simply a fistful of fuses in search of a match; they are also the bearers of tremendous potential and promise. These kids want to make a difference; but they want to do it on terms that mean something to them. Earth Force engages young adolescents by employing a simple stratagem: meet them where they are. Perhaps surprisingly, one place where they are turns out to combine a concern for the environment and a desire to serve their communities.
Kids Care About the Environment
A recent Harris Poll reinforces the experience of Earth Force's year-long project sites in Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. The survey found that kids really do care about the environment. Almost 7 of 10 students in grades 4 to 12 are interested in learning more about environmental problems and what they can do about them; 6 in 10 bug their parents to recycle, for example. Evidence of their desire to be of service comes from the recent national evaluation for the Corporation for National Service program, "Learn and Serve," conducted by Brandeis University. Ninety percent of all students who had been involved in service learning at school—that is, in projects that tied the curriculum to community-based service—thought that their peers should have the same experience. The national evaluators also found that service learning activities yielded significant changes on measures of social responsibility, social skills, leadership, and several academic performance indicators.
But in the end, Earth Force officials say, it is the pent-up energy, idealism, and optimism of youth that create the most successful entrées into the inner life of students. "When you provide a context that ties learning to practical results they can see, it changes them as human beings," says Donna Power of the national staff.
Two girls in Robert Gatewood's class illustrate the power of this kind of engagement. Before Earth Force, school officials had to schedule the girls' day so that they didn't cross paths; the enmity between them was so great that they were sure to fight. But both girls got so involved in Earth Force that Gatewood was able to successfully team them as lab partners.
- After surveying 1,000 homes, a Newton, Massachusetts, Girl Scout troop found that more than 200 had house numbers that were difficult to find, too small, or missing. In other words, Newton had a serious environmental safety issue with potentially life-threatening consequences for residents who might need emergency services. Their solution? The scouts organized community support for an ordinance requiring 2-inch house numbers to be painted on curbs all over town.
- Since 1995, Earth Force has been a leading environmental partner for Nickelodeon's "The Big Help," a multiyear, volunteer, environmental initiative that enlists young people.
- In fall 1998, Earth Force launched its national Get Outspoke'n campaign to reduce pollution and traffic congestion by encouraging communities to become more bike-friendly and to make biking a safer and easier commuting option.
It is in working through Earth Force's long-term, project-based model, however, that the most powerful learning occurs. Here, local school and community programs combine environmental education with community service while integrating learning across the curriculum. Earth Force education provides directexperience of three kinds of educational activities: care for the environment, service learning, and civic engagement.
The Earth Force model draws on both school and community resources to impart basic knowledge while teaching skills that enable young people to reflect on their experience. At the same time, students learn the civic skills necessary to organize for community action, conduct public communication campaigns, identify potential changes in policy, and persuade local officials to make changes. Says Annie Brody, Earth Force's coordinator for national programs, "Environmental education is successful with young people because it addresses the whole being—the feeling, creative, intuitive self—and couples it with analytical, critical thinking."
The Earth Force Model
- Students first take a community environmental inventory. "Remote problems like the destruction of the Amazon rain forest are difficult for U.S. youngsters to have any direct impact on," says Earth Force's president, Tom Martin. "But through Earth Force, students learn they can take hold of problems they can see with their own eyes and work on in their own community, whether it's a polluting factory or a deteriorating wetland."
- Through Earth Force, students sharpen their data-gathering and analytical skills. They study maps, take walking tours, interview officials, and research the Internet. They learn to investigate the community's own resources and strengths, seeking allies and identifying potential opposition, whether the problem they work on is part of the natural or the built environment. At Cole Middle School, for example, students were surprised at the many community resources who could help them study drinking water, such as activist environmental groups, local experts, and official agencies.
- Students then select their problem. One bedrock principle of Earth Force is that all projects are student driven; the decisions on how a given project is to proceed are theirs. Even if the teacher knows that students are making a mistake, they are allowed to make it—with oversight and guidance—so they can learn from it. Teachers familiar with the program have learned to trust the truth that being an educated person ultimately means taking charge of one's own learning—even when you're only 13. In other words, Earth Force takes the risk that students will rise to the challenge of growing into their own autonomy.When a Denver teacher in another Earth Force project, Patty Ann Corsentino, led her kids to a local creek to set up a pollution monitoring station, the youngsters insisted on carrying to the water's edge a classmate who must ordinarily use a wheelchair. The experience led them to redefine their idea of "environmental problem" to include the notion that an "environment" has intrinsic social and human dimensions, one of which is that local recreational areas ought to be accessible.
- Students move from researching the problem to investigating the policy environment in which the problem is embedded. Who makes the policy that controls land use? What factors drive the policy on resource consumption? What pressures are officials subject to? Why aren't existing policies more environment-friendly?Robert Gatewood's students' investigation of the policy concerning clean water, for example, soon turned up a crucial policy distinction. As Denver Earth Force coordinator Harry Ford tells the story, in quizzing the students he learned that they had fully grasped the policy implications of the differences between testing water samples taken from city water running from the street to a house and testing that same water directly from the kitchen tap. Outside the house, the water might test pure by water company standards; inside older homes, it might be affected by lead plumbing. Crucial to forming policy options, however, was Denver's higher pH water (slightly acidic), which students had learned could precipitate more impurities in the drinking water once it came inside residences that had copper plumbing. The policy question asks, Should the slightly higher acid content, although still "safe"—and perhaps preferable for other reasons—be tolerated? The students named their project "If the Water Is Nasty, Fix It" to express the policy option that their research indicated that was best.
- Students identify options for influencing policy and practice, looking for ways to define a course of action. In West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, junior high school students conducted a study that came up with 14 policy options for solving problems of overcrowding and accidents on a network of bike trails. Some options were unworkable, like banning walkers altogether. Nonetheless, the students insisted on taking a strict approach. They recommended that the Parks Department establish and enforce a series of carefully chosen trail rules. Then they brainstormed with officials on ways to publicize and enforce the new rules.
- Students plan for and take action in the civic arena. In McKean, Pennsylvania, five teachers teamed up to help 7th and 8th graders find ways to improve the water quality in a local watershed. Their action plan included a presentation by a public speaking team and the creation of individual Power Point programs in a competition to see who would present the project at the local Earth Day celebration.In Denver, Robert Gatewood's students plan to carry their project into next year, when they hope to collaborate with another group of students who have been instrumental in generating a grant to support the weatherization of low-cost housing. Gatewood's charges hope to piggyback a water-filtration component onto the weatherization project for homes with high levels of water impurities.The focus on water quality has enabled Gatewood's students to integrate their learning across several academic disciplines. For example, the students conducted their own water tests on pH, hardness, and chlorine content. Their investigation of policy issues delved into social studies, local government, and civics. Writing up the results of their investigations sharpened their language skills. Interviewing city officials taught them important relational skills.This kind of interdisciplinary work is designed directly into all Earth Force learning. Students can't avoid making connections between diverse bodies of knowledge because effectiveness on environmental issues, by definition, requires input from several academic disciplines. And, there is an added benefit. As Robert Gatewood pointed out, once his students decided on a geographic area, they came to understand that everyone in that area, even the people they didn't know, was a part of their community because all were affected by the same problem.
- Finally, successfully completing a project often means "high fives" all around. But Earth Force also builds in a period of sober reflection and assessment. Students use essays, skits, displays, and student-produced videotapes to achieve a sense of closure; all are occasions for new learning. Looking ahead, students learn to ask themselves such questions as, How can the results we have achieved be sustained? Often, student groups will seek media attention for their efforts. In the curb-painting project in Newton, Massachusetts, for instance, students contacted local media and got a student-written article about their project into the newspaper. Such local media coverage is common to Earth Force efforts.
In the end, one of the most important results of an Earth Force project is what it does to young adolescents' sense of themselves as they form the values that will shape their lives as adult citizens. Certainly, they acquire knowledge and skills in academic and social areas that they will need later in life; Earth Force projects are good preparation for real work because they are themselves real work. Young people come to understand, too, the complex interface between environmental issues and difficult policy choices. They learn that making choices in the public arena—particularly about resources—often means choosing between competing goods.
Just as certainly, young people gain the self-confidence that comes from defining, taking on, and solving problems that matter in their own communities. But along with taking pride in these school-based accomplishments, they grow as human beings. As Annie Brody points out, environmental education addresses the whole student because, in the last analysis, it is grounded in hope. "When young people truly feel, understand, and value their connection to their environment, and learn the skills needed to bring about change," she says, "then they are empowered to act. Then they can hope. That hope lives in one's soul, but it is empowered by reality."
The experience of that reality—the hope that comes from knowing that their effort can have an impact—makes a transforming difference in the lives of young people.
