Almost 200 “climate ambassadors” recently attended a United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef)-funded conference in Zambia to discuss ways of surviving climate change and to develop strategies for dealing with the effects of global warming.But the delegates were not heads of state or policy-makers but proactive teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18.
During the conference, the teenagers designed action plans for implementing informed policies in their communities across Zambia. The Zambian Children’s Climate Conference was set up to educate young activists about what they could do about climate change in their home towns and how to develop effective solutions.
But although the Zambian children seem to be environmentally conscious, communicating in the vocabulary of the most recent climate science, the level of sustainability discourse in South Africa’s school curriculum is lacking.
“In subjects where sustainability should feature, it’s not in any way explicit,” said Andrew Petersen, science education specialist in the schools development unit at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Petersen was a member of the team that wrote the current school curriculum in 2002.
‘Moves to align curriculum’
At that stage, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) had not yet been launched.
Unesco’s DESD emerged at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002, from a suggestion put forward by the Japanese delegation to highlight the need to promote change in approaches to education so as to integrate the principles and practices of sustainable development.In December 2002 the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution, spanning from 2005 to 2014.
There are now moves afoot to adapt the existing South African curriculum to align with the DESD.
“Governments, international organisations, NGOs, educational institutions and schools are now variously engaged in campaigns to promote education for sustainable development on a global scale,” said Petersen.
The government of Japan is supporting attempts to integrate this into the general framework of primary and secondary school education and is financing research with the schools development unit at the University of Cape Town to develop a module for classroom application, he said.
UCT’s development unit, in collaboration with the department of environmental affairs and planning, has also developed a climate-change education and awareness programme for secondary schools in South Africa, which they have begun implementing in certain schools.
Petersen and the development unit have also developed a training package for teachers in secondary schools, in cooperation with the department of environmental affairs and development planning and the City of Cape Town, to learn how to integrate education in sustainable behaviour into the syllabus.
So far, two four-day workshops have been attended by about 150 teachers.
‘Very limited’
Dr Kevin Winter, a lecturer at UCT’s department of environmental and geographical science, said that when the current curriculum was developed in 2002, there was “very limited” talk of climate change.
“It only features in geography now and not in other subjects,” said Winter. But there was an argument for not getting on the “bandwagon” of climate change, and it made more sense to educate children in the practicalities of sustainable living. The problem, he said, lay in the details of how to change behavior relating to climate-change mitigation.
“Sustainability education would include ideas that enable one to deal with concepts such as pollution and lower energy usage. One of my major gripes is that this is not included in subjects such as economics and agricultural sciences, which would naturally encompass those values and practices,” he said.
Although environmental education has been in place in South African schools for 40 to 50 years, Winter said teaching the science of how the environment is being affected is important but there is “an urgent need” to think critically about politics and the implications of living in a consumer society.
“It’s not about the science. There’s a sense of hopelessness. The carbon is up there already. So critical thinking on how to eat, consume and dispose needs lots of attention,” said Winters.
Linda Cilliers, head of research and publications at OneWorld Sustainable Investments, said policymakers often underestimate the importance of involving children in climate talks. “It’s not only for the education of the child but also for the power of the child to educate an adult,” she said. — West Cape News