The young man with the oversized WWF panda on his jacket was not in the least surprised by my response.
I didn’t know that the NZ Government had taken “wildlife” out of the curriculum.
“Not many people do”, he answered conspiratorially. “What’s more your neighbours don’t think “wildlife” should be taken out of the curriculum, and nor do we …. we all want children to learn about “wildlife”.
Mr WWF was voluble, enormously sincere and quite compelling. Misunderstanding my initial reaction (to the audacity of his claim) as belief in its truthiness, he was emboldened to make wilder and wilder claims.
Apparently the NZ government had not been content with deleting all mention of “wildlife” from the curriculum – it had gone further and expunged anything relating to “the environment” as well.
“The NZ government doesn’t think our children need to know about our clean green environment”. His eyes widened in genuine distress. “… so what do you think of that?”
I let him continue without once letting on that his arrival had dragged me away from the NZ curriculum document where I had been critiquing some teacher planning featuring both “wildlife” and “the environment”.
Sometimes in life it is best not to spoil the moment – this was suburban street theatre and quite the most entertaining interruption of a day spent writing resources and answering email.
And all too soon we got to the kicker – the need for a generous donation of my money to get the “wildlife” back in the curriculum. I still regret that I did not press him for detail at this point – a curriculum is a political document and if a global multinational can buy space for their product placement it would be good to know.
It must have been the newness of my black T-shirt because I got the double donation offer - I could make an additional donation and help fund teams of people to clean up “the environment” – the one that our government and curriculum documents so neglect.
At that point I explained (as gently as I could) that I did not want to pay to put “wildlife” back in the curriculum or for that matter for teams of people to clean up “the environment”. Perhaps there would be others more caring than I further down the street. We parted on good terms. The man in the panda jacket took his script and his clip board and went to find another audience - I returned to the NZ Curriculum document.
The interesting thing about the whole exchange was that contrary to the WWF script playing out on doorsteps in my neighbourhood, “wildlife” and “the environment” have not gone anywhere – they remain strong players in the NZ curriculum documents.
I can find places for learning about pandas and the environment in all curriculum learning areas - English, The Arts, Health and Physical education, Learning languages, Mathematics and statistics, Science, Social sciences and in Technology.
To take something obvious - the achievement objectives in Learning Area > Science> Living World> Ecology have many opportunities for learning about “wildlife”.
Level One and Level Two
- Recognise that living things are suited to their particular habitat.
Level Three and Level Four
- Explain how living things are suited to their particular habitat and how they respond to environmental changes, both natural and human-induced.
- Investigate the interdependence of living things (including humans) in an ecosystem.
- Investigate the impact of natural events and human actions on a New Zealand ecosystem.
- Explore ecological distribution patterns and explain possible causes for these patterns.
- Explain how the interaction between ecological factors and natural selection leads to genetic changes within populations.
- Understand the relationship between organisms and their environment.
- Explore the evolutionary processes that have resulted in the diversity of life on Earth and appreciate the place and impact of humans within these processes.
- Understand how humans manipulate the transfer of genetic information from one generation to the next and make informed judgments about the social, ethical, and biological implications relating to this manipulation.
In truth if I had my way I’d be voting to limit the amount of panda and enviro - study that goes on in NZ schools and balance it with explorations of the material and physical world and the nature of science – which do seem to be underrepresented in curriculum overviews.
It made me wonder if the WWF really does believe that “wildlife” and “the environment” have been deleted from the curriculum or if it was just some kind of cynical WWF spin to extract funds from those who live in the suburbs - the middleclasses with their identified weakness for celebrity wildlife - the photogenic pandas and their ilk.
Perhaps it is all about how we interpret and understand words. A situation where "wildlife" is not seen as a subset of living thing. Ecosystems and habitat are not seen as being connected to "the environment".
Perhaps it is that learning is seen as being far more tightly scripted than it is in New Zealand classrooms.
Words are funny things – so many educational conversations seem simply an exchange of slogans – we are careless with meaning – failing to elaborate on what we mean by what we claim – which in turn limits our progress in making any real change to the outcomes that bother us most.
A study that clearly shows the perils of using words in education without carefully teasing out their meaning is this one by Westby and Dawson which found that whilst elementary school teachers claimed to value creativity in classrooms - they reported distaste for students demonstrating personality traits associated with creativity. I don't know if the results are generalisable - the sample size is small - but it is disturbing nonetheless.
As Jonah Lehrer opines in this post creativity is complicated.
Everybody wants a creative child - in theory. The reality of creativity, however, is a little more complicated, as creative thoughts tend to emerge when we're distracted, daydreaming, disinhibited and not following the rules. In other words, the most imaginative kids are often the trouble-makers.
Reference: Erik L. Westby; V. L. Dawson (1995) Creativity: Asset or burden in the classroom? Creativity Research Journal, Volume 8, Issue 1 January, pages 1 – 10 pdf