With a
goal of nurturing students to become ecoliterate, the Center for Ecoliteracy
has identified five vital practices that integrate emotional, social, and
ecological intelligence. They are described at greater length in our book,Ecoliterate:
How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological
Intelligence (Jossey-Bass, 2012), from which the excerpt below is
taken.
We work
to inspire teachers to use a variety of learning opportunities that help
students consider and apply these practices in a diverse range of contexts.
These practices allow students to strengthen and extend their capacity to live
sustainably.
1.
Developing Empathy for All Forms of Life encourages students to expand their
sense of compassion to other forms of life. By shifting from our society's
dominant mindset (which considers humans to be separate from and superior to
the rest of life on Earth) to a view that recognizes humans as being members of
the web of life, students broaden their care and concern to include a more
inclusive network of relationships.
2.
Embracing Sustainability as a Community Practice emerges from knowing that organisms
do not exist in isolation. The quality of the web of relationships within any
living community determines its collective ability to survive and thrive. By
learning about the wondrous ways that plants, animals, and other living things
are interdependent, students are inspired to consider the role of
interconnectedness within their communities and see the value in strengthening
those relationships by thinking and acting cooperatively.
3.
Making the Invisible Visible assists students in recognizing the myriad effects
of human behavior on other people and the environment. The impacts of human
behavior have expanded exponentially in time, space, and magnitude, making the
results difficult if not impossible to understand fully. Using tools to help
make the invisible visible reveals the far-reaching implications of human
behavior and enables us to act in more life-affirming ways.
4.
Anticipating Unintended Consequences is a twofold challenge of predicting
the potential implications of our behaviors as best we can, while at the same
time accepting that we cannot foresee all possible cause-and-effect
associations. Assuming that the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of
life, students can adopt systems thinking and the “precautionary principle” as
guidelines for cultivating a way of living that defends rather than destroys
the web of life. Second, we build resiliency by supporting the capacity of
natural and social communities to rebound from unintended consequences.
5.
Understanding How Nature Sustains Life is imperative for students to
cultivate a society that takes into account future generations and other forms
of life. Nature has successfully supported life on Earth for billions of years.
Therefore, by examining the Earth's processes, we learn strategies that are
applicable to designing human endeavors.
