opinion & features

Alana Lajoie O'malleyAnd time to rock the educational boat

Ah yes.  The parade of eager students tidily filing into their classrooms has begun.  Another year to fill their heads with all the facts and figures they’ll need to become contributing members of the global economy.  

Given the time of year, I guess it isn’t so surprising that there’s this line that keeps running through my head – “we need to graduate a generation of solutionaries.”  Zoe Weil said it in her TEDx talk called The World Becomes What We Teach. Do me a favour – Google it.  Solutionaries – people with the knowledge, the tools, and (most importantly) the motivation to be conscientious choice makers and engaged change makers for a world well on the road to real social and environmental responsibility.  Solutionaries – active, intelligent, empowered citizens not satisfied with contributing to a global economy plagued with social and environmental injustice.  Citizens intent on making sure that the part of the world to which they belong actively seeks to achieve real responsibility to people and the planet.

"What if all over Manitoba, students became real stakeholders and citizens of their school communities"

Are we graduating a generation of solutionaries here in Manitoba?  Google ‘Manitoba Education for Sustainable Development’ and you’ll find countless resources and good news stories about all of the work that educators in Manitoba are doing to make sure that students understand what it means to respond to the needs of other people and ecosystems.  And, thanks to these efforts, some solutionaries are starting to trickle out of Manitoba schools.  But we need a flood, not a trickle.  

So humour me in a back-to-school thought experiment.  What if the very buildings, people, and institutional structures in which students learn were to become the test bed for their fledgling solution-building abilities and proclivities? What if all over Manitoba, students became real stakeholders and citizens of their school communities?  What if they were tasked with undertaking and understanding the hugely important but daunting task of changing their places of learning so that they more and more closely reflect the principles of social and environmental responsibility their teachers are increasingly introducing into their classrooms?  What if, with students at the helm, Manitoba’s schools became living laboratories for institutional change towards sustainability?

Schools as living laboratories would be places in which everything... would be opened up for student scrutiny, study, and, most importantly, action.

Imagine a project integrated into classes at all levels that reduced a school’s greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water use, and waste production; improved the social and environmental impacts of the supplies and products it bought; and made the school a happier more inclusive place for everyone.  The Sierra Youth Coalition’s High School Sustainability Assessment Framework is one tool that helps students do just this. 

Schools as living laboratories would be places in which everything from institutional governance to boiler rooms to cafeterias to curriculum would be opened up for student scrutiny, study, and, most importantly, action.  This amounts to an invitation for students and teachers in math, English, geography, and so on, to find the gaps between textbook theory and the practices they live with every day; an invitation to treat these gaps as the precious learning opportunities that they are.  Why, for instance, do we continue to use fossil fuel to heat our buildings in Manitoba given our understanding of the causes of climate change?  

Being willing to expose these gaps would require nearly herculean humility and confidence on the part of educators – no one likes having apparent hypocrisies put under a microscope.  But hey, what better way to teach the kind of emotional intelligence sustainable development requires than to demonstrate it in action? 

That sentence.  It keeps rolling around in my head.  “We need to graduate a generation of solutionaires.”  ‘Gen S’.... kinda has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

– Alana Lajoie-O’Malley is the director of the campus sustainability office at the University of Winnipeg. To comment on this or any other article in Outwords, e-mail editor@outwords.ca