We’re rooted in the places we live. Environmental education helps learners of all ages forge connections with, explore, and understand their immediate surroundings. Although learning can take place anywhere—near and far, the sensitivity, knowledge, and skills needed to make local connections help provide a basis for understanding larger and more complicated systems.
Transcript:
I'm Nicole Ardoin. I'm an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and I'm a senior fellow with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
Place can be really compelling in many different ways, in many different scales. So I think that, you know, especially for young people, but even for adults, even for grownups, it can be so exciting to learn about these faraway places that are just magnificent. It can be really exciting to learn about rainforests. It can be exciting to learn about spectacular species like pandas and the places where they live. Or, for example, I do a lot of work in amazing places like Galapagos and who doesn't want to learn about the incredible scientific history of a place like that, where your imagination can just run wild and think about the incredible species that live there and the amazing landscapes.
Places are also really important though to think about what is the place in your backyard look like? And what are those relationships that we develop with places that are around us every day?
And so I think that when we talk about place, in particular places in environmental education, we're not only talking about these faraway places, but we're also talking about places that are closer to home. And I think it's important to remember that it's not an either / or. That it can be both / and.
So we can encourage young people to get excited about places far away. We can encourage people to feel passionate about conserving places that are far away and magnificent for many different reasons. And at the same time, we can also remind them that there are places and species that deserve our protection and deserve our respect and also that really are in need of our stewardship that are right here in our own backyards.
And so I think it's interesting to think about our complicated relationship to places and think about what place actually means. And this to me is why place is so important in environmental education. It's that place isn't only just the biophysical place. Places aren't just the trees that I'm seeing outside my window right now or, or the stream that might run behind someone's house or, or the pocket park that might be down the street from you in New York City or San Francisco or Chicago, or Bloomington.
Place is really about the people who are in your community and it's really about the way the connections you have with each other. So place is really comprised of all these different aspects. And so that to me is why it's so important when you think about environmental education because place is the way that we talk with each other and we learn with each other about the world around us, which makes it a core concept, I think, in environmental education. Environmental education is about how do we learn about the world around us and how do we make good decisions about how we want that world to be both now and in the future?