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Why this is taught the way it is taught — and how to run a session so it does something.

What sustainable development means

Section 1 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

Bridge the Gap is a stack of activities, not a stack of chapters. That is on purpose. A child can learn the definition of a watershed, score full marks on it, and still not know where the water in her tap comes from. The activities exist because knowing a thing and doing something about it are two different skills, and only one of them is on the exam.

The idea underneath them is sustainable development. The 1987 Brundtland Commission put it in one sentence that has never been improved on: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Read plainly — take what you need, and leave the place able to feed the people who come after you.

It has three parts, and they are not three separate subjects. Environment, society, economy. A dying lake is not only an environment story: it is a water-bill story and a livelihood story at the same time, and the people who feel it first are the people with the least room to move. Culture runs underneath all three, which is why the same idea looks different in every district it lands in.

This is a break from the model that came before it, which treated foul air and emptied aquifers as the price of getting rich — unfortunate, unavoidable, somebody else’s problem later. That bargain is no longer accepted. Damage on that scale now counts as a cost of the development, not a side effect of it.

Two words get used as if they were one. Sustainability is the destination: a world that can keep going. Sustainable development is the road — farming, building, manufacturing, governing and teaching done in ways that get you there. If a student asks for the difference, that is the whole answer.

The rest of this guide is short. What education for sustainable development is and what it is for (sections 2 and 3). What environmental education claims to do, and who does the work in a lesson (section 4). Four ways to teach it — a game, a discussion, an argument taken apart, a story (section 5). What to do about the fact that everything is joined to everything (section 6). And what all of it runs into in an Indian school (section 7). If you read one section before Monday, read section 5.

What ESD is, and its four thrusts

Section 2 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

The principles it rests on

Any sustainable development work has to hold the three spheres together — environment, society, economy — with culture underneath all three. Because it is always about a particular place, it takes a different shape everywhere. The ideas underneath are shared: fairness between generations, fairness between men and women, peace, tolerance, less poverty, land and water repaired rather than only guarded, resources conserved, justice. The Rio Declaration of 1992 sets out twenty-seven principles. Eight of them, in plain words:

  • People are entitled to a healthy and productive life, lived with nature rather than against it.
  • Development is a right — but it has to meet the needs of the people alive now and the people not yet born, and meet them fairly.
  • Ending poverty and closing the gap between how people live is not a side goal. Without it there is no sustainable development.
  • Protecting the environment is part of development, not a department you consult afterwards.
  • Action taken across borders has to answer to the interests and needs of every country, not only the ones with the most to spend.
  • Countries should stop making and buying in ways that cannot last, and adopt population policies that fit their own conditions.
  • Women manage much of the world’s land, water and fuel. Nothing works without their full part in it.
  • War wrecks sustainable development. Peace, development and protecting the environment cannot be pulled apart.

These read like paperwork. They are not. Each one is a test you can hold up against a road, a factory, a scheme or a news story, and ask whether it passes.

That is the move worth teaching. Not the list — the test.

What ESD is

ESD stands for education for sustainable development. Some countries call it education for sustainability. It is not a subject. It is a way of teaching the subjects you already teach.

The reason is uncomfortable and worth saying to a class out loud: nobody yet knows how to fix all of this. The knowledge that would solve it is not sitting in a book waiting to be handed over — a lot of it has not been worked out. So the job is not to give children answers. It is to leave them able to find answers: read evidence, weigh a trade-off, argue without shouting, and act.

This is why education keeps turning up where you would not expect it. Agenda 21, the plan agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit, runs to forty chapters covering everything from farming to rubbish, and education appears in every one of them. Not as a chapter of its own — as the thing the other thirty-nine depend on.

The United Nations ran a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development from 2005 to 2014. That is where the acronym comes from, and where much of the framework in this manual originates.

ESD is wider than teaching facts about the environment. It reaches into who gets into the classroom at all, what is on the timetable, how a lesson is run, what gets marked, and what the school itself does with its water and its waste. A school that teaches a beautiful lesson on conservation and then burns its own rubbish in the corner of the ground has taught the second lesson, not the first.

At its shortest: ESD is education meant to change how a society works, not only what a child can recall in an exam hall.

The four thrusts

UNESCO sets out four thrusts — four places the work has to happen. Two are about schools. Two are about everybody who has already left one.

One: get children in, and keep them there

A child who is not in the room cannot be taught anything, and a child who leaves early has only been taught the part that came first. Getting boys and girls into school and keeping them there is the first thrust, because every other page of this manual assumes a class. A good basic education leaves a student with knowledge, skills, judgement and a way of earning that does not cost them their health or their village’s water.

Two: change what is already taught

The second thrust is not a new subject. It is a rethink of the ones already on the timetable, from nursery to university, asking of each: what is taught, how it is taught, and what is examined. Sustainability becomes the thread running through them rather than an extra period nobody has room for. The point is forward-looking. The problems your students will handle are not the ones in this year’s question paper, so what they most need from you is the ability to think when the question is unfamiliar.

Three: everyone outside the school gate

Policies are voted on, and paid for, by adults who left school long ago. The third thrust is public understanding — people knowing enough about where their water, power and waste actually come from to make a decision worth making.

That work happens in community groups, in local campaigns, and in what a newspaper or a channel chooses to explain rather than shout about. Teachers touch it more than they think, through parents and through what a child carries home.

Four: people at work

Every trade can be done well or badly: the mason, the farmer, the driver, the clerk, the engineer, the person running a municipal office. The fourth thrust is training at work — continuing, practical, built into the job rather than delivered as a lecture once a year — so that whoever is making the decision knows how to make it well.

The first two thrusts happen inside formal education. The last two happen outside it. All four are needed, and no part of the system can cover them on its own.

What ESD looks like, and the values under it

Section 3 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

ESD has a set of marks. A lesson carrying most of them is doing the job; a lesson missing them is a lecture with a green title. ESD:

  • rests on the principles and values set out above;
  • holds environment, society and economy together, with culture underneath all three;
  • uses more than one way of teaching, so that students take part instead of copying down;
  • assumes learning carries on long after school ends;
  • is local — about this town, this river, this market;
  • starts from local need, while admitting that a local habit can have effects a long way off;
  • works inside school, outside school, and in the places nobody calls education at all;
  • moves as the idea of sustainability moves, because it is still being argued over;
  • teaches content, but always sited — a global problem, a local priority;
  • builds the ability to decide things together: tolerance, care for the place, work that adapts, a life worth having;

And one more, which is the one that gets forgotten:

  • no subject owns ESD. Not science, not geography, not civics. Every one of them can carry a piece of it. (UNESCO 2005)

The marks stay the same. What they look like in a room does not. The same list produces one lesson in a city classroom of forty and another in a single-teacher school in a hill district. That is the design, not a failure of it.

“Education must simultaneously provide maps of a complex world in constant turmoil and the compass that will enable people to find their way in it.” (Delors Report)

The values underneath are the ones in the Rio Declaration: fairness between generations, fairness between men and women, peace, tolerance, less poverty, land and water restored, resources conserved, justice. Three of the twenty-seven are worth putting in front of a class, because they are the three students argue with:

  • people are entitled to a healthy and productive life, lived with nature rather than against it;
  • development has to meet the needs of those alive now and those not yet born, and meet them fairly;
  • ending poverty and closing the gap in living standards is not optional — nothing else holds without it.

From these a school can work out what it actually wants its students to know, to be able to do, and to care about. Writing that down is the difference between a school that runs ESD and a school that mentions it.

The five pillars

Every generation decides what to teach the next one, which is why education keeps changing and why it looks different in a hill village and in a metro. Underneath the differences sit five pillars — the things any good education does.

Four come from the Delors Report: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. UNESCO added a fifth for sustainability: learning to transform yourself and your society.

Most school systems are very good at the first and adequate at the second. Learning to live together, learning to be, and learning to change something are the three squeezed out whenever the syllabus is behind — and they are exactly what the activities in this manual are built to deliver. That is why the activities are not decoration around the real lesson. They are the part the lecture cannot do.

Values, and whose values

The values under ESD are not exotic: human dignity, basic freedoms, rights, fairness, care for the place you live. Which of them a particular school leans on is a conversation — with teachers, the head, parents, the community, and, where it is allowed, the students themselves. Values decide far more than people admit. How we see the world, how we treat each other, what we expect of a government, whether a forest reads as a resource or as a home.

Knowing your own values is the first half of this. Knowing that the person across the room holds different ones, honestly, is the second.

Understanding your own values, those of the society you live in and those of people elsewhere sits at the centre of educating for a sustainable future. It is a skill rather than a mood: name a value, see where it came from, and ask whether it stands up.

Every country, community and person has to learn that skill separately. Nobody is born with it and no exam tests it.

The Earth Charter is a good place to start. It is an ethical framework built out of a decade of argument across countries and cultures, covering respect for the community of life, ecological integrity, human rights, diversity, economic justice, democracy and a culture of peace. Schools in many countries teach from it.

Here is where education that serves development and education that serves sustainable development part company: the values sitting inside the syllabus. Some societies value short-term growth above everything, and the cost lands on people’s safety and on the environment. Others value the common good enough to give some of the gain up. You can teach this through ordinary history. Take the industrial cities of Britain and America in the late 1800s: the mills made fortunes for their owners while workers were maimed and rivers ran filthy, and that was treated as the price of progress. Ask the class who paid that price, whether they were ever asked, and what would have to be different for the same factory today. That is a history lesson and a sustainability lesson in the same forty minutes, and it costs you no extra period.

Teachers often ask how ESD relates to environmental education, which came first. Environmental educators were the first group to back ESD and kept the idea alive through the 1990s, and environmental education still feeds it both content and ways of teaching.

So ESD has part of its root in EE. They are not the same thing. Section 4 sets out what EE itself claims to do.

Environmental education, and who does the work

Section 4 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

Environmental education has a definition that has held since 1977, when governments met at Tbilisi and agreed one. It is worth reading slowly, because it sets the bar a long way above “children should know about trees”.

“Environmental Education (EE) is a process aimed at developing a world population that is aware of and concerned about the total environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, attitudes, motivation, commitment, and skills to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones.”

Knowledge

It gives people and communities a working understanding of the environment, and of how humans and the environment act on each other.

Awareness

It makes people notice — the problem, and the fact that it is a problem.

Attitude, skills and taking part

Attitude. It gets people to value the place they live, to want it improved, and to join in improving it. Skills. It teaches people to spot an environmental problem, see one coming, prevent it, and repair it.

Taking part. It gives people a real chance to act, and to make decisions about the environment with their eyes open. This is the one that school environmental education usually stops short of.

For a long time EE meant teaching about the environment: facts delivered, awareness raised, nothing else asked of anybody. Since the 1970s it has aimed wider — a population that knows things, minds about them, and does something.

There are three ways in, and a good session uses more than one:

  • About the environment. Knowledge. What is there, how it works, what humans are doing to it.
  • From the environment. The place itself as the classroom — a drain, a compost pit, a tree in the school ground, the market outside the gate. This is where attitudes actually form, and it needs no equipment.
  • For the environment. The step where concern turns into responsibility and then into something done together. It is the hardest to arrange and the only one anybody remembers.

The teacher-centred lesson

In a teacher-centred lesson the aim is to move knowledge from the person at the front to the people at the desks. The teacher picks the material, sets the speed and delivers it. The student’s job is to take it in and hold on to it. Almost all of us were taught this way, and a crowded syllabus pushes you straight back towards it.

It runs on the lecture, and a lecture is one-way. Students cannot test what they think against you and find out where it is wrong. They cannot try an idea, be corrected, and try again. It is efficient at covering ground — and it is how a class can pass a chapter on water scarcity without once thinking about the tank on their own roof.

The student-centred lesson

A student-centred lesson assumes students learn by working on something, not only by receiving it. You still decide what matters. You spend your time designing the work and then coaching the people doing it. Students bring more into the room than we usually let them use: what they have seen at home, what they already know, what they are curious about. Given something to do, they are active rather than merely seated. Sometimes they choose what to look at, how, and how fast. Your role moves from source to guide.

  • Learning is personal and social at once. Students set some of their own goals.
  • Meaning is built, not handed over. It comes out of doing something and then talking about it with other people.
  • The methods are ordinary: find something out, solve a problem, study a case, take on a project, argue it, work in a group, go outside.
  • What happens in class is the starter. Most of the real learning happens after the bell.
  • Students take new information and turn it into a shape that makes sense to them and attaches to what they already knew.
  • They are put into a real situation and coached as they need it. One caution, and it matters: this works best with students who are old enough and know enough to choose sensibly. With a young class, or one with no grounding in the subject yet, leading from the front first is not a failure — it is the right order. Give the ground, then give the freedom.

Five things you can change on Monday

  • Ask for more than recall. Write the aim of the lesson as something a student has to do — compare, judge, choose, defend — not something they have to repeat.
  • Break the lecture. Every ten or fifteen minutes, stop and hand the class something: a question to settle in pairs, a disagreement to resolve, one thing to report back. Forty children can do this sitting in rows without a bench being moved.
  • Cut what has to be memorised. Spend the time saved on making one principle properly understood. A student who holds the principle can rebuild the facts; a student holding the facts cannot rebuild the principle.
  • Less talking from the front, more work in the room. If you want students to be able to explain something, apply it, or argue with it, a straight lecture will not get you there. The same forty minutes spent on active work gets further.
  • Let them teach each other. Put students in groups with no teacher in each one, or pair a senior with a junior. Explaining something forces you to organise it, and organising it is where the understanding arrives. (University of New South Wales)

Why behaviour is the thing to aim at

Behaviour is what people actually decide and do — shaped by what they value, what they can afford, what everyone around them does, and what is convenient. Bruce Byers makes the point that behaviour is the joint between the natural system and the social one: it is where a society meets a river. Behaviour can protect a place or wreck it. Which means a programme that never asks what the people it is aimed at currently do, and why, is being designed in the dark.

What makes a lesson good for everyone in the room

UNESCO lists ten things that mark a quality education. Five of them are about the individual student:

  • go and find the student who is not there;
  • treat what a student already knows and has lived through as worth something;
  • make the content relevant to their life;
  • teach in more than one way;
  • improve the room they learn in. (UNESCO, 2005)

Varying how you teach is not a nicety. Not everyone in a class learns the same way — some take things in by listening, some by reading, some only by doing. The traditional lesson serves the students who are good at listening, reading, memorising and sitting still, and rewards them all the way to the exam hall. The others are not less able. They have been taught in the one way that suits them least.

This is where teaching method turns into a question of fairness, which is a sustainability idea and not only a school one. For years only the students who read, memorised and recited well got ahead. The rest struggled, and some of them left. Every additional way of teaching is a door held open for somebody who was about to be counted out. Students notice it being held open, and they learn from that too — which is the whole argument for a school practising what it teaches.

Gender works the same way. Boys and girls arrive with different things expected of them, more sharply in some communities than in others, and those expectations reach into who answers, who handles the equipment, who is sent outside to measure the drain, and who is left writing it up. Watch that in your own room for one week. It is usually not a policy. It is a habit, and habits can be changed.

Four ways to teach it

Section 5 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

These four techniques are the working part of this manual. They make students ask, take apart, judge and decide. They move a lesson from you talking to them working, and from memorising to thinking.

They are usually built around a place or a problem — this drain, this landfill, this crop — and they run on discussion, on argument, and often on the arts: drama, play, music, drawing. What you are after is a student who can picture a different future and believes they are allowed to want one.

Four follow, each with what it is for and how to run it: a simulation, a class discussion, an issue taken apart, and a story. Each works a different muscle. If you have never run anything but a lecture, start with the discussion — it needs no preparation beyond good questions, and it is the easiest one to stop.

A simulation, or a game with a point

In a simulation you set up a situation and the class lives inside it for a while. They are a fishing village that has to keep catching fish year after year without emptying the water or starving. They are a panchayat with one working borewell and four demands on it. They play; the rules do the teaching.

A simulation is a simplification, and that is where its power comes from. Sustainability ideas are abstract — a feedback loop, a shared resource, a delay between a cause and its effect — and abstract ideas slide off a room of teenagers. Inside a game they become something that happened to them in the third round. Younger students in particular need the concrete before they can hold the abstract.

How to run one without losing the room

Why it works:

It reaches the students who learn by seeing, by hearing and by doing, so the ones who never shine in a written lesson get a turn. It puts a real community problem in front of the class. And it asks for judgement rather than recall.

Five steps, in this order:

1. Teach the idea first. Ten minutes on the concept the game is about. A game played before the idea is only a game.

2. Set the scene. Who are they, where are they, what do they want? Two minutes, no more.

3. Give the rules — out loud, then written on the board where everybody can see them. Most simulations that collapse collapse here. Take one question, then start.

4. Walk the room while they play. Do not referee every dispute. Nudge the group that has wandered off and let the rest run. Noise is not the same thing as chaos — listen to what the noise is about before you stop it.

5. Stop it while it is still going well, and talk about what happened. Leave a third of your time for this.

The talking afterwards is where the learning gets fixed. Skip it and you have run an entertainment.

Three questions do the whole job, and they work for any simulation:

What did you learn?

Where is this like real life?

Where is it not like real life?

The third question is the one that protects you. It is where a student points out that the game let everyone talk to each other and a real village cannot, or that nobody in the game was poor. The answers can also take you by surprise. One teacher ran a resource-management simulation and asked her class what they had learned. The first group said: “It’s not possible.” She wrote it on the board without arguing. The other groups took the claim apart themselves and showed the class that it was possible. Let them do that. Those three questions will tell you more about what a class understood than a test would.

A discussion — and what to do when you do not know the answer

A discussion lets what students know travel sideways — student to student — and upwards to you, instead of only downwards. They arrive with lives you have not lived. Somebody’s father sorts waste for a living. Somebody’s grandmother remembers when the river could be swum in. Somebody spends an hour a day fetching water. That is teaching material no syllabus can buy, and a discussion is how it gets into the room.

Why it earns the time:

One of the things ESD is meant to build is the ability to say what you think, out loud, to people who disagree — with a point, listening to the answer, building on what somebody else said instead of starting again, summing up, asking. Those are skills. They take practice, and there is nowhere else in the timetable to practise them.

How to run it:

Plan it like anything else. Build it around a question, a problem to solve, a plan to make, or something the class has just done. It can be the whole class, or groups of two to six, which works better in a big room. Lead it yourself, let a student lead it, or let it run. Set the rules first — one voice at a time, disagree with the point and not the person — and enforce them the first time, because the first time is the only time it is cheap.

And when a student asks something you cannot answer, say so. They will ask, and it is usually a good question. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Write it on the board, give it to two students to bring back on Friday, and carry on. A teacher who says “I don’t know” once has not lost the room; a teacher who bluffs and is caught has lost it for the year. In this subject the honest answer is very often that nobody knows yet — which is the most useful thing a class can learn from you.

Taking an argument apart

Issue analysis is a way of pulling a real local problem into pieces: what is happening to the place, who is affected, what it costs, who is making money, who is deciding. Students name the main arguments, the people behind each one, what each of them wants, and what each is assuming without saying it. Then they turn the same treatment on the proposed solutions — what the fix costs, in money and otherwise, and who ends up paying. It can take ten minutes or a fortnight. It crosses science and social science, which is usually the point.

Why it earns the time:

Every real problem your students meet as adults will look like this: several truths at once and no clean answer. They will vote on these things. Some of them will decide them. Holding a complicated thing still for long enough to examine it is a learnable skill, and school is the last place with time to learn it. It also teaches the trap of the local fix that exports the problem — cleaning up one town’s waste by putting it on a truck to another one.

It does something quieter as well. Students already sense that something is wrong — in their colony, in what they scroll past all day — and have no way of examining it. They see wealth and hardship on the same street and are told both are normal. Issue analysis hands them a method instead of a mood. The method is the same whatever the issue, which means you teach it once and they keep it.

Telling it as a story

Stories carry ideas that lists cannot. Take them from the news, from history, from a film, from a book, from your own life, and from what the class’s grandparents remember. India has taught by telling for as long as it has taught at all — a story passed on to hold what a village had learned about its own land, its water and its animals. Folk tales carry it. So do the stories about how a place got its name. Using them is not nostalgia; it is the same technique, and it teaches respect for where a child comes from at the same time as it teaches the point.

Why it earns the time:

A story makes a textbook idea move. It puts a person inside information that was dry, and the person is the part that gets remembered. It reaches students who take things in by listening. A list of definitions is hard to recall; a story carrying the same definitions is not. And a story is a gentle way in — nobody has to have an opinion yet, which is useful in a subject that can otherwise feel like a lecture about guilt.

Systems thinking, and the ideas students arrive with

Section 6 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

The goal of ESD, as the Cloud Institute puts it, is “to develop in young people and adults new knowledge and new ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity, participate democratically, secure justice and equity, and all the while regenerate the health of the ecosystems, the gift upon which all life and all production depend”. Environmental education got the world this far. It brought knowledge, feeling and political weight to what is happening to the natural world, and made a great many people think harder about their own place in it. What ESD adds is a way of thinking: systems thinking. You can teach systems thinking without ever mentioning sustainability. You cannot teach sustainability without it.

Systems thinking means looking at how the parts of something affect each other over time, instead of at the parts one at a time. A body is a system. So is an engine, a forest, a family, a market. Systems sit inside other systems. They are webs rather than chains, and they move. Which gives you the most useful idea in this section: a system has no front door. Take someone who is unwell. One friend asks where it hurts. Another asks what they ate this morning. A third asks what was used to paint the new room. Each question comes out of a different life, and each one is reasonable.

Follow any of them far enough and it leads to the others, and to a fuller picture than the question you started with. There is no correct place to enter a system.

People arrive at this work from all over. Some come through a love of one animal or one hillside. Some come through health — their own, or a child’s. Some come through business, having worked out that the way things are made cannot continue. Some come through justice: rights, poverty, who ends up breathing the worst air. Some come through what they feel they owe their grandchildren. For some it is faith. Every one of those doors opens into the same house.

This matters practically. It means you never have to convince anybody that your way in was the right one — where a person stands depends on where they sit. It means you have far more allies than you thought, including some you would not have picked. And it means the student who cares about the street dogs and the student who cares about her own asthma are both already in the room, and neither of them needs correcting.

Before you pick an activity out of this manual, work out which door your class is already standing at. Start there. You can walk them round the rest of the house afterwards.

Mental models, and the three worth shifting

A mental model is the frame you see the world through: your values, your assumptions, your education, what has happened to you. Everybody has one and almost nobody examines theirs. Changing one takes an experience, not an argument. “Things are this way because they have always been this way” is a mental model. So is “the Earth’s resources are unlimited and nature is a store cupboard for human use” — still quietly held by people who make very large decisions. So was “everything goes round the Earth”, until Copernicus showed otherwise in 1543.

Mental models sit upstream of everything else. Donella Meadows put them near the top of her list of places to intervene in a system: they decide the goals people set, the structures they build, the rules they write and the things they leave out. Change the model and the rest follows. Which is why somebody who can change their mind when the evidence changes is worth more than somebody who happened to be right the first time. A person who is good at this can:

  • see their own assumptions, and say them out loud;
  • change one when it stops holding;
  • explain to other people why the new one is better;
  • keep noticing the habits of thought they slide back into — the assumptions never questioned, the things quietly given up on;

Those habits are the hard part, because they are invisible from the inside. This is where a class is useful: forty people do not all have the same blind spot.

  • and sit with a contradiction without rushing to settle it.

That last one is a real skill and worth naming for a class. Two things can both be true. A dam gives power and takes a valley. Being able to hold that steady, instead of picking a side to make the discomfort stop, is most of what thinking well looks like.

Three mental models come up again and again in this work, and each has to shift before anything else can.

The Titanic. “We’re going down anyway, so I may as well travel first class.” Picture the goals, the rules and the behaviour that grow out of that one sentence and you have most of the problem. Now picture somebody who takes seriously that how the next generations live depends largely on decisions being made now, including theirs, and who plans for a grandchild they will never meet. Different goals, different rules, different behaviour. Same facts.

Ask a class which of those two they are living in. Then ask which one the adults around them are living in. Then ask what would have to be true for it to change.

The zero-sum game. A game with winners and losers. If that is your model of how the world works, you play everything to win, because who wants to be the loser? But not every game is built that way. When the players depend on each other, the only way to win is for everybody to win — a different structure, different rules, and so different behaviour. Water shared between neighbouring farms is that kind of game. So is a shared courtyard, a shared road and a shared sky.

The social trap. “It makes no difference what I do, nobody else is doing it.” Or its twin: “Everybody else does it, so why shouldn’t I?” Stand on your chair at a concert to see better and within a minute everybody is standing on a chair. Nobody can see any better and everybody is now uncomfortable. This is what happens when what makes sense for one person, taken separately, is ruinous for all of them together — the tragedy of the commons, in school uniform. The way out is not better individuals. It is acting together.

In 1949 Aldo Leopold wrote, in A Sand County Almanac, that “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community but his ethics prompt him to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).” That is still the argument.

So the question to carry into a lesson is not only what you want students to know. It is which idea already in their heads has to move first. Everything in this manual — the games, the discussions, the arguments taken apart, the stories — exists to move one.

Teaching this in an Indian school

Section 7 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

Start with the room, because the room decides everything else. Forty children, often more. One blackboard. Forty minutes. A syllabus you are behind on, and an examination at the end of the year that will not ask a single question about any of this. Everything in this guide has to survive that, or it is a poster on a staffroom wall. It can survive it — a discussion needs no equipment, a simulation needs chalk and a set of rules, a story needs neither, and all three fit inside a period. But nobody should pretend the period was free.

The second thing about the room is what the students are already being trained for. School here is measured by the marks it produces, marks buy a seat, and a seat buys a job. Everyone in the building knows it, parents most of all. So a subject with no marks attached gets treated as a subject with no value attached, and a teacher who spends a period on it is spending their own credit. The way round this is not to fight the syllabus. It is to carry the syllabus inside the activity: run the water lesson and the measurement practice in the same forty minutes; take the history chapter and ask the class who paid for the progress in it. A session that finishes syllabus is a session you can defend in the staffroom.

There is a legal footing under this too, which is worth knowing when somebody asks why you are bothering. Environmental education is not an optional extra in Indian schools. The Supreme Court directed in 1991, in M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, that it be taught as a compulsory subject at every level. NCERT prepared a model syllabus for classes I to XII in December 2003, and in July 2004 the Court directed every state to adopt it, with NCERT as the agency supervising that. The intention has never been in doubt. What varies is what actually happens in a room — and that depends on the person standing in it.

Which brings us to the thing worth saying plainly. India’s development has not been evenly shared. A rising Sensex, new malls, taller towers and wider roads describe a standard of living. They do not describe a quality of life, and they do not describe most people’s. The children in front of you know this already; many of them have watched a parent absorb a cost that somebody else’s convenience created. An education that trains them to consume well and never to ask who pays has taught them how to get a job and nothing at all about the country they will get it in. That is the gap this manual is named after. You close it forty minutes at a time.

Where this comes from

Section 8 of the introduction to Education for Sustainable Development.

Bridge the Gap is a compilation, and this is its reference list, printed as the manual prints it. Much of it is teaching material published by other organisations — among them the US Environmental Protection Agency, WWF, Amnesty International, the FAO and the Centre for Environment Education in Ahmedabad — listed here because material was drawn from them. Nearly all of it is free to download. If an activity in this manual works for your class and you want more of the same kind, this is where to go next.

The reference list

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Next

The eight themes, and the words.

Look a word up

The A to Z334 environmental terms, defined plainly

Bring us in

Work with a schoolSwechha runs these sessions with schools directly

The data

LearnWhat the numbers behind these themes actually mean