With a goal of nurturing students to become
ecoliterate, the Center for Ecoliteracy has identified five vital
practices that integrate emotional, social, and ecological intelligence.
They are described at greater length in our book, Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence (Jossey-Bass, 2012), from which the excerpt below is taken.
We
work to inspire teachers to use a variety of learning opportunities
that help students consider and apply these practices in a diverse range
of contexts. These practices allow students to strengthen and extend
their capacity to live sustainably.
1. Developing Empathy for All Forms of Life
encourages students to expand their sense of compassion to other forms
of life. By shifting from our society's dominant mindset (which
considers humans to be separate from and superior to the rest of life on
Earth) to a view that recognizes humans as being members of the web of
life, students broaden their care and concern to include a more
inclusive network of relationships.
2. Embracing Sustainability as a Community Practice
emerges from knowing that organisms do not exist in isolation. The
quality of the web of relationships within any living community
determines its collective ability to survive and thrive. By learning
about the wondrous ways that plants, animals, and other living things
are interdependent, students are inspired to consider the role of
interconnectedness within their communities and see the value in
strengthening those relationships by thinking and acting cooperatively.
3. Making the Invisible Visible
assists students in recognizing the myriad effects of human behavior on
other people and the environment. The impacts of human behavior have
expanded exponentially in time, space, and magnitude, making the results
difficult if not impossible to understand fully. Using tools to help
make the invisible visible reveals the far-reaching implications of
human behavior and enables us to act in more life-affirming ways.
4. Anticipating Unintended Consequences
is a twofold challenge of predicting the potential implications of our
behaviors as best we can, while at the same time accepting that we
cannot foresee all possible cause-and-effect associations. Assuming that
the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life, students can adopt
systems thinking and the “precautionary principle” as guidelines for
cultivating a way of living that defends rather than destroys the web of
life. Second, we build resiliency by supporting the capacity of natural
and social communities to rebound from unintended consequences.
5. Understanding How Nature Sustains Life
is imperative for students to cultivate a society that takes into
account future generations and other forms of life. Nature has
successfully supported life on Earth for billions of years. Therefore,
by examining the Earth's processes, we learn strategies that are
applicable to designing human endeavors.
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint. From Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social and Ecological Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett, and Zenobia Barlow. Copyright © 2012 by Center for Ecoliteracy.
