It really is a pleasure to be here today to talk about environmental education, and, more specifically, about biodiversity education -- especially since it's come up all day today, and that's really good.... I really do commend the Museum for putting on a symposium like this, not just to address the science issues, but also to have some dialogue between the scientists and the educators. We don't get together enough and talk about some of the issues related to biodiversity conservation. I also know how much work it took to put this whole symposium together.

I've been asked to speak about our national biodiversity education program that we're developing at World Wildlife Fund called Windows on the Wild. It's a program to help educate people of all ages about biodiversity. But before I actually get into what I'm going to do today, I'd like to find out very quickly who's in our audience: How many of you are K-through-12 educators? How many of you are educators who work at zoos, museums, nature centers, nonformal institutions? How many of you are students? How many of you are scientists? How many of you are interested public and parents? How many of you are lawyers? It's a nice mix of people here, and it's really a good opportunity to have some discussion about biodiversity.

In the short time that I have today, I'd like to tell you just a little bit about WWFs philosophy of environmental education the process we're using to develop this national biodiversity education program. We're trying to incorporate what we know works in education, and try and see how we can change the somewhat gloomy future that some of us have painted today about what we need to do to keep biodiversity around.

I'm going to start by showing a clip from a new biodiversity video that we've just developed called, "Biodiversity: Exploring the Web of Life." This video was produced in conjunction with Earth Force and WQED Pittsburgh. We did this because we wanted to present the concept of biodiversity to kids in an entertaining and upbeat way that addresses some of the important issues and also gives kids some hope. Because we think that video, TV and other kind of multimedia presentations are just one small piece of how we educate the public today and how we educate kids.

The video features two stars from "My So-called Life," which was a television program that was on a couple years ago; and then interviews with scientists like E.O. Wilson. Tom Lovejoy, Fatima Jackson and some others; short vignettes about Terry Irwin's original research; and also features Gary Hartshorn down in Papua New Guinea, leading a team there.

As many of you know, "biodiversity," the word, is really tough. If some of you have read some of the polling data that's out there -- we know that people don't know what the words means, and, in fact, some people really don't like the word at all. In fact, in one meeting, someone said: Biodiversity sounds like a government program that I'm not ready for. But we feel, in context, that we really can educate about biodiversity.

... That will give you an idea of what the rest of the video is like. It's very fast-paced.

Actually, as many of you know, World Wildlife Fund is one of the largest conservation organizations working worldwide to protect biodiversity. In the United States, we have more than 1.2 million members, and we work in more than 100 countries around the world, including in the United States. We're also connected to a larger family. We call it the family; it sounds like the Mafia. But we've got organizations and program offices in more than 40 countries around the world. And we like to describe ourselves as a science-based organization, and our mission worldwide is to protect biodiversity.

In trying to conserve biodiversity, we use several lines of attack. Many of you are familiar with this and are using the same kinds of strategies in the work that you do -- from conserving species of special concern, to looking at trying to protect the harbors of biodiversity. We feel that two of the major tools that we have to protect biodiversity are environmental education and capacity building. By capacity building I mean building the capacity of individuals and organizations and communities to conserve biodiversity. As part of our environmental education initiative in the United States, we launched a new environmental education program called Windows on the Wild in 1993. We received a generous gift from Eastman Kodak Company that got things started; but we've also received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Pew Charitable Trust, and a number of other funders that allowed us to develop a multiyear program, where we could build evaluation in from the beginning and get input from people across the country.

We feel that, as an educational tool, biodiversity is a great organizational umbrella, because you can talk about so many critical issues -- everything from ethics to sustainability to economics -- and highlight a lot of the good work that's being done, highlight a lot of the careers in conservation.

But we think it also offers us an opportunity to talk about the amazing diversity of life that's out there -- the really amazing, good, exciting stuff that's out there, and all the complex interactions. A lot of the reasons that all of us in this room today are here is because we care about the environment, and we're amazed and interested in what we've found.

We want to make this issue come home to everyone, whether you live in a critical ecoregion, or whether you live outside of an ecoregion. No matter who you are, biodiversity counts, and that's what our education program is really trying to do.

We especially wanted to reach students and educators, so that we could help build a more sustainable future, and help educate future leaders about environmental issues. We also want to reach future politicians, and business leaders, and journalists, and give everyone in society a grounding in environmental issues, so that people will care about this issue and want to do something.

But what I'd like to do today, very briefly, is talk about the process that we're using to develop the program, and how we're trying to make biodiversity come alive. The process is as important as the product -- of getting people involved along the way, and tailoring your program based on the needs of the audience and the evaluation that you do. I want to emphasize that World Wildlife Fund is an international conservation organization -- the best education happens at the local level. Our role is developing some tools and helping to make things happen, but the real work happens in the community, as we just saw with the last presentation. What's going on here in New York, and how can we engage people?

One of the first things that we did was set up a national advisory board to provide ongoing support and guidance. It includes scientists and educators from zoos, aquariums, museums; evaluation experts, teachers -- all kinds of folks -- so that we could get advice along the way, and try and get some input that we don't normally get. We often talk to ourselves a lot in this field.

We also tried to do our homework with this program. We conducted a national needs assessment, and part of that included developing a national survey. We also did focus groups, we checked the literature. We wanted to see what educators felt they needed and they wanted, where the gaps existed, and to try and get some information that would help guide a national biodiversity project.

An international survey .... We got responses back from almost 3,000 educators, both formal and nonformal educators. We worked with the University of Wisconsin to develop this -- in fact, some of you might have participated in that original survey -- and we found that there was a great interest in biodiversity education and in environmental education. There was also a great interest in helping to collaborate between formal institutions and nonformal institutions, although there were many constraints -- from time and money, and legal problems -- of why more schools don't do more with nonformal institutions, and vice versa.

We also found that teachers and nonformal educators wanted more materials and training on biodiversity. But educators, especially in schools, do not have time to teach about the environment given the way the system is set up right now. Our survey confirmed what a lot of states say -- that more than 85% of the people that responded to our survey said they spend less than an hour teaching about the environment a week, and this was from very motivated individuals that cared enough to return a survey.

There's also quite a bit of public-opinion poll data from the Consultative Group on Biodiversity, from Defenders of Wildlife, and from World Wildlife Fund and others, pointing to the gap that exists between what scientists know and what we heard here for the last couple of days, and what the public knows and understands -- which to me says there's a real need for education. We see our job, as educators, as trying to translate the messages, and trying to do appropriate education for the key target audiences.

In developing the program, we devised a biodiversity education framework to help guide the program that includes key concepts: what are the important skills?; what are the important actions and experiences? We made a decision to focus the program initially on middle-school educators, based on our knowledge of environmental education and on the advice of the experts. There's a big push for interdisciplinary education at the middle school, and we wanted to at least start there -- although we're doing a menu of programs and training materials with a variety of audiences, including high school, university, the general public and decision-makers.

We knew from the start that we wanted to develop an innovative program that was based on good science, good education. We didn't want to duplicate what was already out there and what other people were doing. And that's not as easy as you'd think, to not duplicate the wheel. One of the things that is good about a symposium like this is we can find out what other people are doing and talk to our colleagues.

We also knew we wanted to involve the stakeholders in the process from the very beginning, so we have done a lot of talking to parents, teachers, students, and other educators across the country, to get input as we developed the program.

I wish I had time to talk about all the educational strategies we're trying to emphasize, but I do want to emphasize a few. One of the things we're trying to do with Windows on the Wild is incorporate the five components of environmental education. A lot of people, when they hear the word "education," they think "information" -- and information is one piece of education. But, as we heard this morning, there's tons of information out there, and it's just one piece. Awareness is important -- making people aware of the issues. But there's a lot more to education. We're putting a lot more emphasis into developing skills: skills to get involved; process science skills; critical-thinking skills; problem-solving skills; and, citizenship skills: How do I get involved in the community? We're also looking at how to look at attitudes and values, underlying beliefs, and how that affects how we act? And, finally, leading to: How do we get people to participate in the political process? As somebody had mentioned, the democratic system is endangered itself.

But one of the things I want to emphasize when we're talking about K-12 education is there is a difference between education and advocacy. We feel that we don't want to lobby on legislation or push a particular point of view with kids. We want them to figure things out themselves: encourage them to investigate issues, to analyze different points of view, to conduct research and come to their own conclusions. And we also encourage educators to go out and use the community as a tool -- it's the greatest education tool that's around. And so we like to think, in environmental education that we do teach kids how to think, not what to think.

We also stress experiential learning. We've talked about that this morning. And for those of you who are not educators, experiential learning I think was best described by Mark Twain when he said: "If you grab a cat by the tail, you'll learn things you could never learn in any other way...." It's getting your hands dirty and getting out there.

We want to emphasize the outdoor exploration piece. No matter where you live, you can usually go outside to do education, and it's a really important part. As we become more urban, it's very important to have these connections with nature, and to build that into how we educate future citizens. We also want to make sure that we use real case studies. There are so many examples that we can pull into what we teach. For example, in our curriculum we're looking at things from case studies on cotton, to the Florida panther, to Easter Island. But we also want to encourage educators to build on local case studies, and to use real examples from the community.

One of the other things that we're trying to do in this program is take a positive approach -- even though there are a lot of very tough challenges. But we want to help people envision a better future.

What does a better future look like? If we say that we've lost more than 90% of the world's rhinos, or that we have fewer than 6,000 tigers left, or that more than 2 billion people don't have access to clean water and sanitation, we really need to help students and the public see that there are things that they can do, and that the situation isn't hopeless. There is a whole movement called futures education that looks at helping people think about: What does a preferable future look like, and how do I get there? And what are the steps I can take as an individual, and what are the steps the community can take? And we also know that there's research out there -- if people are totally overwhelmed and feel that what they do will have no impact, they won't do anything. But if there are some things they can do, people will go out, if they get some positive feedback. And we have many, many success stories about people changing the world by their actions.

Another thing that's really important is building a nation of critical thinkers. I mentioned this earlier. But we want to help kids investigate issues and develop the creative problem-solving that they're going to need as adults. We also want kids to think about what they read, learn how to detect bias and come to their own conclusions. I think we'd all agree in this room that probably many of us were raised on a lot of facts, and we memorized a lot of stuff. And that's probably how a lot of us got our A's and B's -- we could memorize. But we're trying to incorporate higher-level thinking into everything we're teaching, from the beginning on up.

We also feel that communication skills are very important. Writing, communicating, speaking, making presentations -- a lot of these skills need to be emphasized from the very earliest grades to the end. We've seen a lot of people that we're hiring that don't have basic writing skills, basic communication skills. Something else that's really important is teaching people how to work in groups. We all problem-solve, we all work in organizations. Sometimes groups are very frustrating. But if you can learn how to get along in a group, and facilitate group interactions, I think we can go a long way to helping to solve problems.

We want to make sure, as I mentioned earlier, that we do communicate: What can you do? We don't want to just provide problems in education, or in the community. We want to give opportunities for students to actually do something. And there are all kinds of things -- from helping in Central Park, to volunteering at the zoo or the museum, to writing a letter -- to whatever kids want to get involved in, or adults. There are always things that can happen.

And, finally, we want to build on what kids know. We're trying to create materials and training that help educators work with students, to know where they are so they can construct new knowledge from what's out there. And this kind of reinforces what Dr.[David] Ehrenfeld was talking about this morning, about watching TV all day and using the remote control. But if you think about it, everybody in this audience came here today with certain experiences; you have preferences for how you like to learn; you have different experiences. You bring that to whatever you're learning, and we need to work with that as we're trying to introduce new concepts, introduce new ways of thinking about the world.

Anyway, all this led to three major goals for Windows on the Wild: to educate and excite people about biodiversity; to stimulate critical thinking, discussion and action on behalf of the environment; and to build in, What are we talking about, a sustainable world? Looking at not just ecological integrity, but how that relates to economics and to social equity; and how all three of these circles relate to culture and politics, and some of the other issues in society.

We also want to work on creating more partnerships, especially between schools and nonformal institutions. Community education is where things happen, and we want to get the community involved in environmental education within a community. We know that thousands of students and educators and the public come to museums and zoos. We want more kids to have this opportunity to learn. You get out of the classroom and you can see things that you'd never see inside the classroom.

And, finally, we feel that providing training opportunities is really an important part. Things like this symposium -- training sessions where we're educating educators who go out and educate others; university professors that work with teachers. And I think Carol [Fialkowski] is going to talk later about some of the partnerships we've done on training together in Chicago....

Now we are into the nitty-gritty of the program development, in terms of preparing some materials and trying to fill some of the gaps that are out there. In preparing the materials, we've tried to rely on a process of developing curriculum in the best way possible, and we're following some of the national guidelines that have been developed by the North American Association for environmental education.

We published a magazine on biodiversity to give students an overview of the issues and talk about issues that they care about: mulling it over; dealing with overconsumption, the things we buy in biodiversity; Raiders of the Lost Potato, looking at genetic diversity and highlighting the work of botanists; the HIPPO dilemma. We use HIPPO as an acronym to talk about some of the major reasons we're losing biodiversity: habitat loss, introduced species, population, pollution and overconsumption. We have an interview with Dr. E.O. Wilson, trying, again, to encourage careers in conservation.

We also have a poster that captures the beauty of biodiversity and talks about some of the critical ecoregions that are in the United States -- that biodiversity is everywhere, not just in the rainforest.

We did an action guide with Project Wild to help educators facilitate environmental-action projects in the community, and follow a student-based learning process to take action. We've done several video kits, including the one I showed earlier; but we've also done one for high-school students; a two-hour special that we did -- this is the educator's guide -- with WQED; and one for elementary students called "Going, Going, Almost Gone: Animals in Danger," that we did with HBO.

We also have a Web site where, if you want more information about Windows, you can check it out -- and we might do some more interactive things on the Web. We're developing a compendium of all the good stuff that's out there. This is a big task, trying to let educators know about the good materials available.

For adults, we're working on something called the Environmental Issues Forum, which is a study guide based on a Kettering Foundation model of how to discuss very complex environmental issues -- to get a sense of what you believe and what your underlying values are.

And, finally, this is the educator's guide that goes along with the video I showed, and that will be airing on PBS.

And now we're working on the core-curriculum materials. This takes the longest, because it involves a lot of intense review. And, in fact, I've already cornered some of you to review it. But we pilot all the materials out with students and educators; we review it by scientists and evaluators; and we're doing a variety of modules. Somebody mentioned overconsumption this morning. One of our modules is going to look at consumption. One is going to look at building better communities; others at wildlife trade; ecosystem planning. And our introductory module, biodiversity basics, is going to look at: What is biodiversity? Why is it important? Why are we losing it, and what can you do?

In addition to the materials, we are working on a variety of training models. As I mentioned earlier, training is an important part. We hope to develop some training of trainer materials, working with a variety of folks, including Green, the Global Rivers, the Environmental Network. We are working with the American Museum here, working with the Chicago Field Museum, and many other institutions that are trying to do biodiversity education. We've been primarily working in five pilot cities, but now we're branching out, to try and partner with as many groups as we can reach and as many educators as we can.

I don't have time to talk about the evaluation piece of what we're doing, but it is an important part of what makes education programs work -- to evaluate and then have the feedback loop, so we can make the program much better. For example, last year we did a literacy-assessment instrument with the University of Wisconsin to try and figure out what is it that kids already know and feel about biodiversity, so we know what we need to do and how we need to develop the materials that we're doing.

We also worked with a linguist in California, looking at some language issues and trying to develop materials that have a language-learning component for all the multicultural students that are out there today, for all of those English-as-second-language learners. We're trying to think about the language, because language can be a stumbling block -- especially with science. We have a lot of noun clusters and big long words that are hard enough for us that speak English as our first language to understand.

We're also going to be starting some international pilots. For example, we've got a small one started in South Africa. We've sent them all our draft material. They're going to probably completely throw that out and do whatever they want -- but we've been able to leverage some Kodak funding so that they can do some environmental education as their country is going through a complete educational reform, based on all the political things that are happening there. We're looking at working in Brazil, China, Mexico and several other countries, to share what we're doing about biodiversity education.

So there's a lot of work to be done. We need to bridge the gap between what scientists know and what the public knows. We need to educate students and teachers, so that our future citizens are committed and informed and engaged. And I think what's been missing from the national debate is a long-term commitment to environmental education. And by environmental education I'm talking about interdisciplinary education, more problem-solving and critical thinking, more outdoor exploration and community investigations, more interactions between scientists and social scientists and educators, more emphasis on careers in conservation, and more citizenship education.

I'd like to leave you this afternoon on a positive note by reading a few of the great letters that we get from kids. Some are from my days when I used to work at the National Wildlife Federation on "Ranger Rick." Among my other jobs, I was Wise Old Owl. We used to get a lot of questions; and some came into WWF. They show that kids have this natural curiosity, this reverence and love of life. And we need to nurture that. Let me read you a couple of these, just to end this afternoon.

"Dear World Wildlife Fund: I read that there are over 10 million insects in the world. Can you tell me who counted them all? I want to know...."

"Dear Wise Old Owl: Why do dogs have black lips?..." Now, think about how you'd answer that, and you can tell why I moved on from that position. We did try to answer all the letters that we got.

One reader told Ranger Rick: "In school I made an incest collection..." Ranger Rick blushed at the thought....

"Dear WWF: I want to adopt a panda. How do you get it to my house?..."

Now, sometimes what's left out of a letter is just as intriguing as what's in it. One little boy wrote: "I have four. Three of them are gray and one is black. They like to jump on the table while we eat. They also like to be in the sink. They like to bother my Mom a lot. We have to put them outside when they are bad. They bother me when I'm doing my homework. I really like them a lot." And we never knew what they were.

And, finally, my favorite letter was from one of the more ambitious readers at Ranger Rick: "Dear Ranger Rick: I have decided to learn all about nature. Please send it to me at once...."

Thank you.

Francesca Griffo:

We have time for one question.

Audience Question:

Do you ever encounter barriers, in terms of access to students and teachers, at the level of school boards or administrators? And, if so, what do you do about that?

Judy Braus:

Actually, that's a very good question. So far, we haven't had a problem with some of the testing that we've done -- but, again, we haven't released this program nationally yet. One of the barriers is the intense constrictions that are placed on educators. For example, in Fairfax County, outside of Washington, DC, nothing can enter the curriculum that is not based on the state standards that are for Virginia, in this case. And one of the things we'd like to see is more environmental education in those standards. One of the efforts that's going on nationally is that the North American Association for Environmental Education is developing learner outcomes in environmental education that touch on all the standards -- science and geography -- because environmental education is interdisciplinary. But that's one reason why it's hard sometimes to test model programs, or innovative programs, because teachers are very constricted by what they have to teach and meeting the standards. We have not run into some of the political problems with biodiversity -- although we have gotten comments back on the primer that some of you might have gotten. There's an article in there called The Natural Enquirer, where we were doing a spoof on The National Enquirer, and had a variety of funny articles in there. One was dealing with sex change We got a letter from Texas that said: "We had to rip out that article, because we can't have sex in the classroom -- but we used the rest of the magazine."

bio | interview