Twisted Lakes: Cradle Mountain, Tas. - You need to read this email on-line to see the pictures

H E N T N E W S

Holistic Education Network of Tasmania, Inc.

Aug 11th, 2001         Send this email to a friend

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This Issue: Ecoliteracy and the Environment

Environmental Education

WWW Sites

Landcare,
Wildcare,
Bushcare &
'Adopt a Patch'

in Australia
Environmental education not only has the capacity to provide meaningful, rich, integrative experiences that foster the development of the whole person as part of the living world, but it can also offer through its approach and practices ways of teaching across the whole curriculum. By students experiencing ecological principles, not only as ideas to learn but as ways of being together, they are better able to live in ways that promote sustainable, healthy futures.

A more holistic environmental education encourages:

  1. physical lived experience – being in the environment, doing things. Eg. sitting,  walking, planting, recycling, observing, measuring.
  2. soulful and heartfelt experience – sense of sacredness, awe, wonder; sense of place, connectedness; authentic knowing; Gaia-awareness.
  3. mental understanding – scientific processes, multiple perspectives, relationships, interdependence, cycles, systems, holons, big picture thinking, parts/whole, integrative vision.
  4. interpersonal understanding - ecological principles underpinning the way we work together.

Picture courtesy NASA

When all these experiences/understandings are integrated in the present moment as the student acts in the world, the student brings forth a practical, critical, caring ethic – one which engenders wise action. 

But is this integration actually taking place through current environmental education? Is the drive for a scientific approach disconnecting students from a lived experience of nature and self?  How can we ensure wholeness? In the following article Tasmanian Environmental  Education Officer, Nel Smit, explores these issues and discusses her efforts to create a more holistic approach. 

Nel's paper: My Patch of Earth

 

For the classroom...

Aboriginal Perspectives in Environmental Education

How to apply ecological principles to classroom learning environments

Systems Thinking

"If you think you are too small to be effective you have never been in bed with a mosquito"

Anita Roddick

Get Active!

Students can feel overwhelmed by the immensity of problems in the world today resulting in apathy or a sense of helplessness. Here is a 9 point plan of what people can do in their local community in everyday ways to make a difference.

Have you ever wondered.... 

What it is like to be a droplet of water, a cloud... part of the water cycle?

A guided visualisation

HENT Web Site and Discussion List

HENT has a comprehensive web site and there is a national discussion list on holistic education hosted by EdNA. 

Previous issues of HENT NEWS.

 

 Cosmo and His Search for a Meaningful Education

You need to read this email on-line to see the pictures

You need to read this email on-line to see the pictures

You need to read this email on-line to see the pictures

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