Brett Girven is the principal of the Arbor School Dubai with more than ten years of experience in the Middle East away from his native New Zealand. This link is to a guest blog he posted on the GESS – Global Educational Supplies and Solutions – website, detailing how his school embedded sustainability in his school while following the English National Curriculum. The school’s ‘ecological approach’ can be found here. The Arbor School “prepares young people for a rapidly changing world, nurturing a core belief in environmental mindfulness, responsibility and the importance of sustainability.”
In the blog, he makes this key point:
“Sustainability in schools is both easy to do, and hard to achieve. Which is interesting, because this article in some ways is an ode to, and critique of, dualism – the separation of this from that. The doing is easy. Schools are littered with the debris of great stuff that has been done. The achieving of, i.e., whether the doing resulted in any permanent improvement, is debatable and largely unknown in most schools. We use proxies to assess the degree to which things improved as a result of the doing. Exams as a proxy for learning. League tables as a proxy for school quality. Staff turnover as a proxy for staff wellbeing… there is very little we explicitly KNOW. Sustainability is the new high priority wave of doing – I wonder what the proxy will be? Eco-councils. Green flags. Designated students with the responsibility to be the tap turner – offers and light switch monitors in each class. We do, do, do, because as educators we optimistically believe that the world can be made better through tweaks and adjustments to the existing way of doing. Well, in a strange deviation from the sustainable development goals, carbon literacy and eco-councils, let me propose that to achieve the kind of education that we need, in order to achieve a sustainable future for our planet and the humans and non – humans who inhabit this earthly household, we require not merely the reformation of existing systems and ways of doing, but a transformation of how we think, know and ultimately do. Lofty goal? Maybe.”
This is how the piece ends:
“So… stop doing. Start living it. Live it in the very fabric of your school. In the way we think, we teach, we test, we buy, we build, we act, we resource, we plan, we play. When we truly start to live it then we are in the process of changing to an ecocentric world view. No one will be perfect at the outset, but we must start, and start now.”
Read on …