Overview Questioning Framework for Environmental Literacy

Introduction To A Question-based Framework For Shaping Environmental Literacy

This Framework is built on the premise that although environmental issues and concepts change with time and changing technologies, the questions that underlie them remain the same. The Questioning Framework for Shaping Environmental Literacy is a curriculum building device based on the premise that questions lead to, and provide the CONTEXT for, basic concepts about the environment and our relationships with it. Such concepts underlie the environmental issues that many programs use as the starting point of their efforts in environmental education. It is our view that environmental issues are inappropriate starting points. Rather environmental education that leads to true environmental literacy, should begin with the context setting questions. We further believe that although the answers to the questions may change with increased knowledge and technologies, the questions remain essentially the same over long periods of time and should be revisited a number of times during one' lifetime.Our task as educators, be we teachers, parents, youth leaders, or adult instructors, is to help learners formulate and frame good questions to explore.

The challenge for becoming environmentally literate is to know and explore the basic questions and to revisit them periodically to discover, based on continuing advances in knowledge and technology, what the optimal solutions currently are. Many of the environmental literacy questions that must be dealt with remain the same, regardless of the time period in which they are asked and investigated. But the answers to those questions will vary with the times at which they are asked. Our knowledge about the environment changes rapidly; our ignorance grows equally fast, often more rapidly. This is because for every question answered or problem resolved, several new ones are generated. This Framework is basically INTEGRATIVE. One might refer to it as inter-disciplinary, or even a-disciplinary. The questions explored often require information from more than one traditional discipline to determine viable answers. In the day-to-day world that makes up our environment, we seldom work only within a single academic discipline. Rather, we blend information from several disciplines to create new information and identify or new alternatives. But blending disciplines is increasingly difficult in a world dominated by disciplinary approaches.

This Framework is based on the understanding that environment is our total surroundings. Environment can be considered to have at least three interconnected, interacting components:
   ° the bio-geo-physical (non-human) environment;
   ° the social environment; and
   ° the mind/body (psycho-physiological) inner environment.
The essence of environmental literacy is our response to the questions we learn to ask about our world and our relationships with it, the ways we seek and find answers to those questions, and the ways we use the answers we have found. Thus, environmental literacy demands understandings, skills, attitudes, and habits of mind that empower individuals to relate to their environments in a positive fashion, and to take day-to-day and long-term actions to maintain or restore sustainable relationships with other people and the environment. Environmental literacy is the goal of environmental education. Environmental education is the processes by which people gain environmental literacy. Environmental literacy should be perceived as a developmental process rather than an end state; it is a continuum of understandings, skills, attitudes and habits of mind. Although there is not a simple, straightforward linear progression of degrees of literacy, there is an educationally functional sequence.

Acknowledgements: Chuck Roth, Earthlore Associates, and Antioch New England Institute