Waste Not: Educating for Ecological Citizenship in Two Pennsylvania Schools

• In Event: 29.090 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.090-20 - Enacting Participatory Environmental Education

Abstract

Informed particularly by the ecological thought of Wendell Berry, this paper shares stories of waste-minded ecological education at two distinct schools in Pennsylvania. It lays out narratively the steps taken by students, teachers, and staff in each school and considers how the learning embedded in these actions is meaningful far beyond the testing-oriented curricula increasingly forced on schools by external forces. Though the two schools in this paper are small, we believe the work done at them is cultivating students’ ecological citizenship and creating sizable, positive communal impacts, and we hope that by sharing these success stories, we are showing that schools offer (and, indeed, need to take up) important ecological citizenship opportunities.

Authors

• Mark T Kissling, The Pennsylvania State University

• Peter Dawson Buckland, The Pennsylvania State University

• Donnan Marie Stoicovy, State College Area School District