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Systemic, Sustainable, and Community-Centered Planning

In addition to the elements that should be found in an environmental literacy plan, building the plan intentionally with a systemic, sustainable, and community-centered approach will set you up to make the most impactful change in your school district. When these goals are centered from the very beginning, you won’t risk wasting already limited resources like time, money, and partnerships. This approach will also maintain the buy-in and support that you’ve developed with your key stakeholders. As you begin to plan, here are some preliminary questions to consider:

Strategies from the Community

Environmental Education can happen in all content areas, not just science.

From Science to World Language, Career and Technical Education to Art, and everything in between, Prince William County Public Schools (page 29) created a cross-curricular implementation guide to show how environmental literacy instruction supports standards of all content areas. Similarly, Richmond Public Schools (page 19) included multiple content areas in their Environmental Literacy Activity Guide in addition to suggesting schoolyard and offsite field experiences to encourage learning outdoors with all subjects.

Include outdoor learning during professional development.

Modeling is an effective strategy during teacher professional development. In Lancaster-Lebanon IU13 (page 3), all teachers attend outdoor field experiences prior to attending with their class. This experience provides practice for teachers with outdoor learning pedagogy, and an opportunity to engage with partners and the site so teachers can better prepare their students for the experience.

Strategies from the Community

School and district facility staff can help identify outdoor learning locations.

Richmond Public Schools (page 33) engaged maintenance and grounds teams early to learn about possibilities and logistics relating to outdoor learning on school grounds. These conversations led to recommendations for improving the environmental learning landscape for students and teachers.

Strategies from the Community

Create a network of community partners to reach systemic implementation and offer localized programming.

Many districts have learned the power of creating a network of partners to help ensure all their students receive locally-relevant environmental literacy programming. Check out these examples:

Richmond Public Schools makes it easier for teachers to find partners by maintaining a Community Partnership Database.