An Educator Goes Deep, From Sustainability to Collaborative Ethnography
By NAOMI HERSHISER
Naomi is an alumna of CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability. She is Dean of Environmental Learning at Prairie Crossing Charter School, in Illinois.
I spent an intensive week this summer with a group of K-16 and community based educators at CWI’s Summer Institute. And, OK, I have to admit that right now — after spending over 2 weeks hiking in the English countryside — The Institute seemed like another lifetime and another world. But that, in some ways, is a benefit. What I think now, what I remember now about The Institute, really is salient!
In the big picture, I think the most important thing that I took away from CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability was sort of a general perspective on the social and economic aspects of sustainability. My work and my passion revolve around environmental issues and that particular aspect of educating for sustainability. My colleagues and I at our school have viewed the other aspects of the triple bottom line of sustainability as challenge areas. We know that we need to do more with crucial issues including equity and access, eco-justice, cultural relativism, etc.
CWI’s Institute got me interacting with people who were entrenched more in these ideas than in the “green” bit, and it got me thinking about different perspectives and ways to approach this. (I’m still grappling with how to deal with some of these issues with younger students.) We talked about David Sobel’s work with the age appropriateness of different environmental topics, and what Sobel calls “Ecophobia” — the need to start from a place of respect and awe before any doom and gloom come into play. So how does that translate to things like poverty and racism when you’re working with a second grader? We’re simply not going to easily have the conversations that I heard my colleagues at CWI’s Institute talking about having with their high school students.
My school, Prairie Crossing Charter School is a K-8 school with an environmental focus. We strive to use a hands-on, integrated and rigorous curriculum that incorporates outdoor learning. We have joined the Green Schools National Network Catalyst Schools, which means that as a model green school, we are undergoing a multi-year process of working to set and achieve goals and share best practices with other schools that want to be “green.” We have identified two main goals. The first goal is Prairie Crossing Charter School will demonstrate growth each year on all academic standards through an integrated curriculum grounded in Education for Sustainability, Service Learning, and place-project-problem based learning (P3BL). Our second main goal is to commit to an inclusive culture of sustainability and caring for self, others and the environment — today and tomorrow. I am the chair of the curriculum (goal 1) committee, responsible for ensuring that all staff has an understanding of P3BL, Education for Sustainability and Service-Learning. I am also responsible for helping teaching teams create and implement curriculum that embraces all of these.
Personally, I came to public education from an environmental education background. I was drawn to my current position specifically because it allowed me to incorporate these environmental education principles. It is important in my life to be connected to the natural world and to be sustainability minded in my choices and lifestyle. I feel I have multiple purposes in my work. I believe that this type of education is best for students and prepares them for their futures. I also believe that students can have a very effective and positive effect on the environment, helping us to magnify and model the impact of eco-friendly ethics.
I arrived at CWI’s Institute hoping to gain tools to work with my teaching team, providing them the professional development and resources to implement Education for Sustainability (EFS) and Place Based Service-Learning in their classrooms. Specifically, my teachers would love to see exemplars of units that meet EFS as well as content area standards, are grounded in place, and employ service/problem-based learning. People at my school really want to see what strong units look like that incorporate all of those elements.
One of my concerns was that I was attending The Institute alone and so if I learned something that shifts my thinking or changes how I think we should be doing things at Prairie Crossing, no one else would have been here with me to have shared that experience. So I knew it would be up to me to communicate this to all the other stake-holders and decision-makers at my school. An obvious challenge we all face somehow is resistance as we work to make crucial pedagogies standard within our schools. We have full administrative support at Prairie Crossing. We know that we don’t want this to be isolated to the classrooms of the teachers that are, for a variety of reasons, more quickly passionate and motivated.
We know that some teachers in all schools are reluctant to give up control and leave behind their more familiar or traditional teaching methods. Most schools also have the challenge that some teachers want the same Service-Learning projects to be able to happen the same way year after year, becoming a predictable part of the curriculum. This doesn’t work, since in some cases, once the “service” is done, it doesn’t need to be done again.
The same learning objectives could possibly be met by a similar or related project. If you’ve gotten Round-Up banned you don’t need to do that again. In other cases, our students want to approach problems differently. This is of course a good thing, but it can also go against some teachers’ desire to have the predictable curriculum. When the curriculum becomes too predictable students often want to do the exact same thing — not truly engaging in the process — just copying what they saw the class before them do because it worked. There is also of course the large need to work on authentic student voice.
Though our school has, as one of its visions, “We keep the environment at the center of everything we do,” when the students leave for the summer, the Round-Up comes out. I tried to get alternatives implemented by working with adults, but there was little interest in spending any additional time or dollars into more fully living out that vision statement. So, I put the bug into the ear of a classroom teacher who I knew was like-minded. We worked with her class and the kids got so involved. The teacher remarked that the thing had taken on a life of its own, she was amazed. The kids presented first to the school’s director and administration as well as the maintenance staff, and were then invited to present at the school board meeting. The board will vote at their next meeting on a policy that dis-allows Round-Up and other similar herbicides on our campus, and our director believes they will vote to ban these chemicals based on feedback he’s heard.
I have been participating in a working group for the Green Schools National Network developing core beliefs. So, I actually have been engaged in trying to develop a collective vision for education. After spending so long immersed in the thought processes and wordsmithing we came up with the following set of statements of belief. “Education should be student-centered and growth-mindset oriented. It should focus on the whole student (all aspects of wellness, not just intellectual wellness!) It should be place-based and culturally relevant. And it involves meaningful participation in the “real world”. Learning should be joyful.”
At any rate, just immersing myself in thinking more about those issues during CWI’s Institute was good for me and expanded my thinking. On a very personal level, the Collaborative Ethnography project we did in the streets of Brooklyn also caused me to grow. I conquered fears and did things that made me initially uncomfortable with very meaningful and positive results.
Before we started I was pretty nervous about the whole experience. I had a working group that was very nice and seemed like they would be good to present our work with, but they were either super confident with it or even more nervous than I was…but this ended up being really good for me. I was very proud of myself because I stepped up and approached people and had really good conversations. I felt very brave.
I think as much as anything I heard or learned, just the experience of going out of my comfort zone and doing something that was challenging and a bit scary even, and succeeding, changed me. We always talk about wanting that for our students, and the persistence that can result but as adults we don’t always have to take risks, or we choose the ones we do take based on the rewards we think will make it worthwhile. Our street based practicum with ethnography isn’t one I’d have done on my own.
As my small group of educators-ethnographers roamed the rapidly changing neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn, I had some impactful interviews as well. My interview with Marcus, a very sincere young black man in his mid twenties was probably the most impactful. Marcus let us know he is homeless, though you wouldn’t guess it to look at him. He has a shelter bed right now so he wasn’t carrying his belongings and he was well groomed. He told us about his situation a little bit. He’s unemployed, couldn’t find work in Connecticut where he’s from, so he came to New York where he thought it might be easier. But he hasn’t found work here yet either. He said it was very humbling, the shelter system. He told us it doesn’t matter where you come from or your race. Four months with no income and any of us could end up there, especially without family support, which Marcus clearly didn’t seem to have.
I didn’t get the story of Marcus’ family, but I wish I felt comfortable asking about it because something definitely seemed to have happened there. I say this because because he told us that, “Humans aren’t capable of unconditional love. All love is conditional and all love and all people are selfish. You gotta grab yours. Sometimes you get robbed and sometimes you’re the robber.” He went on, “And with this economy, it’s not pretty. Once you’ve been in people’s place, you realize it’s not a clear picture, it’s not black and white.” Marcus clearly didn’t get served first, and he clearly had some experiences that made him not trust his fellow humans. Yet he seemed open and friendly and proof that you can have an important human interaction, at least for five minutes in the park.
Our ethnography experience at CWI’s Institute was just really sobering and really real. Because it’s not like I learned anything I didn’t cognitively already know about access and the human condition and whatnot. I don’t know, it was just sometimes sad, and honest, and always real. I actually think I would have liked this project more if I had focused more on people’s stories instead of trying to learn about Brooklyn. A lot of people had a lot to say about Brooklyn but is seemed almost superficial — everyone EVERYONE, everyone said “gentrified”. “It’s getting gentrified.” Some people thought this was good and some thought it was bad but it was definitely the buzz word.
So I take our experience doing ethnography with me although I’m still considering how I can repeat this experience with my students in our particular semi suburban setting. I am still toying with the idea of translating the concept of gentrification as the main change/theme to the concept of urban sprawl as the main change/theme for an ethnography project. I likely won’t do person-on-the-street style interviews as part of this.
I would, rather, have people come into the classroom that have diverse perspectives. Farmers, both old school and more recently-arrived organic; families newly arrived and those who have lived here for a long time. I think place-based education and using the community as a classroom is a strength of ours at Prairie Crossing and this will be a natural way to use a person, place, event or phenomena as an entry point and learning experience.
I also took away some ideas from CWI’s Institute around how to increase experiences like this for our students. For example, I’d like to work with our PSO (parent group) to create a database of parent/family members who have different areas of expertise, experiences and backgrounds that are willing to come in and work with classes. We have a lot of this happening on an informal basis, but it’s usually dependent on who’s in a specific teacher’s class that year. (Mrs. Smith has a family from wherever, so they come in and talk about that to Mrs. Smith’s class) But a lot of these parents, grandparents, etc. would be willing to do this for other classes that their kids aren’t currently in, especially if it advances the curriculum. Eventually, we could start a resource list for non-family members, too, as a lot of times these connections are made because one teacher knows someone, but if they leave, connection lost! I’ve thought we could even do a parent speaker series.
There were a lot of other things at CWI’s Institute on Place Placed Service-Learning and Sustainability that were impactful to my thinking and that I plan to use. Among these are the idea of “windows and mirrors”. I think this is a great metaphor — and can apply to a lot of things, even simple things that aren’t big sustainability topics. For example, a poem. How does the poem explain the world, what is its context message and how does it help you understand yourself better? Or an animal, how is it adapted to survive. What can you learn about an animal scientifically, and what can that help you learn about yourself? How do you see yourself reflected in those adaptations? As well as, of course, the big sustainability things!
I really liked the whole idea of belonging and mattering that permeated The Institute. A guest faculty member shared a presentation on how the brain works around such things that was great and had a lot of useful ideas. We also talked about the notion of deficit lens vs. asset lens, along with attributional retraining. I think a lot of these concepts will be really important to a classroom teacher or social worker. I see students but I often don’t get to know them as personally as a classroom teacher. I think the understanding is very important for program design. It also gets into how we communicate in general, and I hope to also pass that along to my colleagues.
During The Institute we also discussed the difference between “outreach” and “in reach”, along with “Where are you from?” The redefinition of that question “Where are you from?” has really become pervasive in my thinking. We talked about the idea of thoughtfully ordering what are actually very personal and complex questions. “Where do you live now?” and, “Where have you lived that has been significant to you?” “Where are your ancestors from?” “Whose land are you on now?” related to our call to acknowledge native lands. An accompanying question can be “What is the history (and future) of your place?” Interestingly, this idea of “Where are you from?” also came up on my trip to England after The Institute, as we were joined for five days by a friend who moved to London last year. He’s originally Peruvian, and has an accent. Latino or Hispanic people are not that common in rural England, and he spent most of his life living in the Chicago area. He lives outside of London but doesn’t identify with that yet. So he told me he gets a lot of “Where are you from?” And it’s not a question he can answer with “Peru” or “Chicago” or “Sussex” so he appreciated that explanation of the complexity of that question.
Finally, I think CWI’s Institute got me thinking about the idea of stories — their validity and importance. And the idea that everything has a story, not just people. How do we get at the people’s stories, and validate them? How do we get at the plants’ stories, and the animals’ stories, and the stories of the water and land? I just like the idea of stories as a unifying thing — meaningful to all, across cultures and species. I’m currently reading Barry Lopez’s new book Horizon, which is long but excellent, and related to a lot of these topics — sustainability, place and the unique characters of different places, colonialism and capitalism and stories. I’d recommend it but I’m not going to lie and say it’s a fast read!
About the Author: Naomi Hershiser Naomi is an alumna of CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability. Naomi is Dean of Environmental Learning at Prairie Crossing Charter School, a multi year US Department of Education Green Ribbon Award Winner located in Illinois. Prairies Crossing is an accelerator school with Green Schools National Network and is also a USGBC/GSNN 2017 Best of Green Schools Award Winner.
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