Environmental Education Guidelines for Community Engagement
North American Association for Environmental Education
REVIEW DRAFT 06/23/16
Contents
Introduction...... 3
Environmental Education Guidelines for Community Engagement: Summary....13
Key Characteristic #1: Community-Centered...... 15
Key Characteristic #2: Based on Sound Environmental Education Principles.....20
Key Characteristic #3: Collaborative and Inclusive...... 26
Key Characteristic #4: Oriented Toward Capacity-Building and Action...... 31
Key Characteristic #5: A Long-Term Investment in Change...... 34
Community Engagement Toolkit(additional pieces still to come)...... 37
Community Wellbeing...... 38
Community-Based Environmental Education: An Overview...... 42
Community Assessment...... 48
Framework of Environmental Education Strategies...... 56
Designing Civic Engagement...... 61
Creating Strategic and Effective Partnerships and Coalitions...... 69
Participatory Design...... 77
Addressing Conflict...... 80
Appreciative Inquiry...... 84
Collective Impact...... 91
Cultural Competence...... 94
Introduction
OPENING PHOTO SPREAD: Opening page(s) with photos of diverse settings and people (rural, urban, workplace) with quotes from case studies. The idea is to give a quick, immediate visual hit that emphasizes the interrelationships between EE and broad-ranging community issues related to urban, suburban, rural, race and ethnicity, class, poverty, workplace, recreation, etc.
Jamal was an environmental educator who just moved to a new community. He has worked for a state park and a local nature center as a teacher-naturalist. But now he was working for a national conservation organization in one of their satellite offices and trying to launch a new environmental education program focused on water conservation. His new title was environmental education outreach specialist, and he realized pretty quickly that not only had he never really worked in such a densely populated urban area, but he was hesitant about his first moves. He knew about education, he knew about conservation. But he was unsure how to work in a community that he didn’t know—and he didn’t want to appear to come in with answers and an agenda to address water issues—especially without knowing what the community was interested in. Where should he start?
Environmental Education Guidelines for Community Engagement(or “Community Engagement Guidelines” for short)is designed for environmental educators working in all communities—from sparsely populated rural communities to more densely populated urban areas. It includes ideas for how to get to “know” a community, and how to keep your focus on environmental quality, but also link your work to community wellbeing and issues that your partners care deeply about. It includes ideas about how to work better together, and how to measure your impact.
Using the Guidelines
Environmental Education Guidelines for Community Engagement points out five key characteristics of environmental education in communities. For each characteristic, guidelines are listed for program developers and educators to consider. Finally, each guideline is accompanied by several indicators listed under the heading, “The guideline in practice.” These indicators are clusters of attributes you might look for to help gauge whether the characteristic is embodied in environmental education programs—or actions you might take to incorporate the characteristic into your work.
Environmental Education Guidelines for Community Engagement can help the educator, administrator, or program developer who is concerned about how best to work with colleagues and organizations, and the diverse needs, concerns, and capacities with a community. It provides direction while allowing flexibility in collaboration, initiative development, and program delivery. These guidelines offer a way of judging the relative merit of existinginitiatives, a standard to aim for in developing new programs, and a set of ideas about effective environmental education rooted in communities.
Community Engagement
What does community engagement mean? These guidelines are designed to help educators think more about opportunities to work with colleagues and organizations in a community—and how, by working together, individuals and organizations can achieve more. There is no one right way to “do” community work. Rather, working with others in a community to achieve shared goals is about a mindset. Instead of “I’m on my own,” it’s “We’re all in this together.” The sum is greater than the parts. Engaging with a community is about not launching a program in isolation, but with partners who also understand community needs and how you and your organization—whether you work at a nature center, a school, a university, a government agency, or a nonprofit—can collaborate more effectively to achieve great results.
Community engagement is about working with a diverse set of partners who may or may not share a focus on the same environmental issues, but who might care about related issues, work with overlapping audiences, or share a commitment to civic engagement. For example, if you care about green space in a community to protect biodiversity and another group cares about green space because it provides safe places for kids to play, it makes sense to team up to pursue similar goals—and learn from each other about the synergistic connections among environmental, health, nature, and play.
Environmental EducationGuidelines for Community Engagement is also about designing environmental education to effectively engage diverse community members in learning about and addressing environmental issues. The guidelines aid in selecting and implementing civic engagement techniques that meet the needs of the program you and your partnersenvision, what you are hoping to accomplish, and the availability of resources.
Why Community?
The concept of community is central to the human experience. We live in communities, and we interact continually with myriad communities, from geographic to virtual to spiritual to professional. These guidelines focus on the vital connection between the environment and community wellbeing, and the role education plays in promoting positive social and environmental change within communities.
In environmental education, we may sometimes think of our work as being about a topic (water conservation, air quality, food scarcity); at or in a place (school, nature center, neighborhood); and for an audience (children, families, business leaders, faith-based groups), often in collaboration with one or more partners. Thesecommunity engagement guidelines focus on all of these elements, including how we can work better together. Partnering with community has long been a key element of environmental education.Shining light on new research from multiple disciplines about how to work more effectively with communities, these guidelines expand on this concept of collaboration—and dig deeper to explore ways of embedding environmental education into the fabric of a community to make our efforts more relevant and sustainable
Who Are These Guidelines For?
Environmental Education Guidelinesfor Community Engagementwas created by environmental educators, for environmental educators—but that’s just a beginning. Communities are enhanced by the broad diversity of individuals and organizations dedicated to environmental quality and community wellbeing. We have worked to make sure that these guidelines, resources, and the related links to tools and techniques, are as inclusive and adaptable as possible. If you care about the environment, its role in your community, and your community’s capacity for taking action on environmental issues, these guidelines are designed for you.
We have drawn on best practices honed by scholars and practitioners in a range of fields from education to social change, communication, sociology, management, government, and business. Whether you work with youth or adults, on behalf of an organization, or as an individual, you can use these guidelines and the resources and activities included here to design environmental education practices that strengthen the interwoven strands of environment and community. Environmental Education Guidelinesfor Community Engagementalso helps environmental educators create more inclusive working environments that support social equity, effective partnerships and coalitions, and long-term change.
What Is Community?
When we consider the word “community,” we may think of the traditional place-based definition—a city, a town, a neighborhood, a block. Or we may think of a community of identity, culture, or belief, or some otherwise self-defining community of interest. A community of practice may come to mind—united by a common craft or profession, and a commitment to learn together. With the advent of the Internet, we may interact daily with members of our “community” from across the globe.
From the perspective of environmental education, perhaps it is most useful to think of community as a system—or an interrelated system of systems. From the natural systems that sustain us (forest, wetlands, soils, water, and air), to the social systems that shape our lives (housing, transportation, educational, and spiritual), to economic systems, no element of community exists in isolation. An understanding of the interlocking systems is the critical foundation for our work—that of building people’s capacity to create a sustainable future.
EE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
“Environmental education is most effective when it speaks to local issues, problems, and priorities. People are more likely to participate in and benefit from environmental education if they see the direct link to personal as well as community well-being.”
Community Culture and the Environment: A Guide to
Understanding a Sense of Place, U.S. EPA[1]
From its early days, environmental education has recognized profound connections between the health and welfare of human communities and the quality of the environment that supports us. Humans rely on the environment for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and our sense of wellbeing.
But communities face many issues of concern, leading some practitioners in the fields of environmental quality and those who work with human health or social justice to see themselves in different lines of work with different—and even conflicting—priorities. With its long-standing goals of strengthening our capacity to address environmental, social, and economic challenges, the field of environmental education is uniquely poised to convene and partner with diverse stakeholders around the issues that interest them most, and facilitate communities in their pursuit of health and sustainability.
Within this field and related fields such as community conservation, citizen science, and youth development there is vast experience with engaging communities in ways that explicitly connect to their wellbeing. Many of the stories, case studies, and toolkit resources in these guidelines tap the knowledge and insights of those in the field. [TOOLKIT LINK: Community Wellbeing, p. 38]
What is Diversity?
Diversity encompasses differences in many aspects of identity, both individual (e.g., personality, learning styles, thought and life experiences) and group/social (e.g., Aboriginal, race/ethnicity, class, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability as cultural, political, religious/spirituality, mental health status, language or other affiliations).[2]
Changing Demographics and Expectations
“Our society is experiencing change at an unprecedented pace, from changes in the demographic make-up of the country to increases in people living in cities to more people, especially young people, living below the poverty line. All of these trends will affect how we build environmental literacy.”
—Environmental Literacy in the United State, NEEF, 2015
Consider the following statistics:
- The United States will become a “majority-minority nation” by 2043. Racial and ethnic diversity will quantitatively become the norm, with no single racial group making up a majority of the population.
- Surveys indicate that as many as 9.5 million Americans identify as LGBT.[3]
- 14.8% of Americans, some 45.3 million people, currently live at or below the poverty line (2013 data).[4]
•People 65 years old or older made up 14.1% of the U.S. population in 2013, but are projected to increase to 21.7% of the population by 2040.[5]
As our communities evolve in response to changing demographics, population shifts, and equity gaps, environmental education must evolve with them. Environmental educators need to know how to work with a variety of audiences and address the needs of diverse learners.
Socio-economic diversity is an important characteristic of the communities in which many environmental educators work. Other factors are deeply affecting that working context, too, as well as the expectations community members have of educational experiences and public life. Today’s information technologies, for example, allow us to share information in quantities, over distances, and with an immediacy that would have shocked us just a handful of years ago. Communities can be better informed, more quickly engaged, and more effectively networked than at any point in history. The ability to research, network, and organize is, quite literally, at our fingertips.
Not only has technology changed how we interact; it is changing how we think. Rather than embracing the expert-driven, hierarchical model that prevailed after the Industrial Revolution, today’s community members are veterans of the “Open-Source Revolution” where access to data is the norm. Reliance on “experts” is giving way to decentralized, bottom-up strategies that reward innovation and information sharing. Leaders in every community sector are learning—sometimes the hard way—that they now need to treat community members as collaborative equals, working less like a hierarchy and more like a wiki. Understanding these profound shifts is fundamental to successful community engagement.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND DIVERSITY
Working in communities challenges environmental educators to become increasingly proficient at engaging diverse audiences in shared learning that moves toward informed decision-making and action.
The insights, skills, and commitments that come from community engagement can also be applied internally to the organizations and agencies in which many environmental educators work. Recent studies demonstrate that many environmental organizations and agencies are not reflective of the growing diversity in American society as a whole and in the communities they serve. According to the 2014 Green 2.0 diversity report, environmental organizations have a “green ceiling” in staffing, training, and outreach that limits the participation of minority, low-income and LGBTQ populations.
Gender diversity has improved over time, although the increase has been primarily for white women. “People of color are 36% of the U.S. population, and comprise 29% of the science and engineering workforce but they do not exceed 16% of the staff in any of the organizations surveyed,” according to the comprehensive 2014 Green 2.0 diversity report.[6]
A National Audubon Society report states, “Throughout its history, the mainstream conservation movement in the United States has mainly attracted a narrow segment of the population—primarily white, wealthier Americans.”[7] Although there have been many positive trends, the environmental movement, including the field of environmental education, still has a long way to go in reflecting this country’s rich and growing diversity.
Using the Guidelines for More Successful Community Engagement
As you will see in these guidelines and the accompanying stories, tools, and links, many environmental educators across the nation are actively addressing the patterns of power and privilege that have combined to exclude, even if unintentionally, key populations from environmental work. Our communities are diverse—a complex tapestry with interwoven strands of race, gender, age, religion, and lifestyles. We are urban, suburban, and rural; we are students, customers, workers, and visitors. We know differences in wealth and poverty, ability and disability, language and culture. We have different access to and familiarity with technologies used for learning and communication. Successful approaches to community engagement are honest about these important similarities and differences. As suggested in these guidelines, those who work most successfully with diversity at the community level examine themselves first.
In some ways, this vision of community engagement represents new territory for many of us working in environmental education. These guidelines challenge educators to question long-held patterns and consider new modes of work. They urge us to examine power relationships, and work collaboratively with community in every aspect, from how we develop our strategies and design our work to how we implement and evaluate our environmental education programming.
We know that creating a successful environmental education program takes planning, patience, research, and insights. And every project, community, and partnership is different. The following guidelines focus on key characteristics of successful community engagement. Many environmental educators are well versed in what makes a good environmental education initiative. These guidelines supplement the basics of environmental education and outline some of the keys to working with others to accomplish a set of joint outcomes, with the goal of building more resilient communities, enhancing social capital, and protecting the environment.
THE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
The Belgrade Charter (UNESCO, 1976) was adopted by a United Nations conference in 1976 and provides a widely accepted goal statement for environmental education. Two years later, the world’s first intergovernmental conference on environmental education adopted the Tbilisi Declaration (UNESCO, 1978). This declaration built on the Belgrade Charter and established three broad objectives for environmental education. These objectives, which follow, provide the foundation for much of what has been done in the field since 1978:
• To foster clear awareness of and concern about economic, social, political, and eco- logical interdependence in urban and rural areas;
• To provide every person with opportunities to acquire the knowledge, values, attitudes, commitment, and skills needed to protect and improve the environment;
• To create new patterns of behavior of individuals, groups, and society as a whole toward the environment.
As the field has evolved, these objectives have been researched, critiqued, revisited, and expanded. They still stand as a strong foundation for an internationally shared view of the core concepts and skills that environmentally literate citizens need to develop a sustainable, equitable, and positive society. Since 1978, bodies such as the Brundtland Commission (United Nations, 1987), the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED, 1992), the International Conference on Environment and Society in Thessaloniki (UNESCO, 1997), the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (United Nations, 2002), and the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (United Nations, 2012) have influenced the work of many environmental educators. By highlighting the importance of viewing the environment within the context of human influences, this perspective has expanded the emphasis of environmental education by focusing more attention on social equity, economics, culture, and political structures.